Wasatch Review International, 3.1, 1994

Wasateh Review

International

Volume 3 1994

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Volume 3 1994

Advisory Board: John Bennion, Mary Lythgoe Bradford,
Michael Fillerup, Susan Howe.

Editor: Tory C. Anderson

Associate Editors: Valerie Holladay, Henry Miles, Julia Konopasek,
Tim Mcinnis

Cover Art Dan Smith

The Wasatch Review Intemational is an annual literary journal dedicated to creative writ-
ing. Contributions from authors of any religion are welcome. Manuscripts (short stories,
poetry, personal essays, dramas, book reviews) must in some way explore the Mormon cul-
ture. Our aim is fine literature—not religious politics—and manuscripts should not be writ-
ten to prove or disprove Church policies or doctrines.

Manuscripts should not exceed eight thousand words. Manuscripts should be typed,
double-spaced, and preferably be available on floppy disk (WordPerfect, MicroSoft Word,
DOS text file). Each manuscript should be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped enve-
lope. Send manuscripts to Wasatch Review International, RO. Box 1017, Orem, UT 84059.
For more information call (801) 371-0615. Those whose manuscripts are published will
receive one contributor’s copy. .

SUBSCRIBERS’ NOTICE

Subscription is $8.00 for one year and $14.00 for two years. Single issues are $9.00. All
subscriptions begin withi current issue unless. otherwise requested. Send subscriptions to

Wasatch Review International, PO. Box 1017, Orem, UT, 84059.

© 1995 by Wasatch Review International
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America
ISSN: 1072-737X

Opinions expressed by the authors in the Wasatch Review International are their own and
do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors, the advisory board, or the The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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Announcing the Wasatch Review's
Third Annual LDS Writers
Conference

Date: August 1995

Place: Utah Valley State College, Orem, UT
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Cost: $18.00 in advance, $23.00 at the door

‘To register, or for more information, write to WRI, Writers
Conference, PO. Box 1017, Orem, UT, 84059.

Last year’s conference attendees were able to listen to and
mingle with writers such as Leonard Arrington, Eleanor
Knowles (senior editor at Deseret Book and author of Howard
W. Hunter), Gerald Lund, and Susan Evans McCloud. In addi-
tion, authors were able to meet with representatives of the ma-
jor Mormon publishers.

If last year’s conference sounds appealing to you, then you
won't want to miss this year’s conference. There will only be
room for 200 people so you'll want to register early. Come join
us for this day reserved just for writers or for those who want to
be writers.

Contents

Letter from the Editor
Where Are the Mormon Writers? ............050ee00- 1
Tory C. Anderson

Essays

Ringing Up Zero... 1 ee ee ee ee ees 23
Tryn Paxton

PLANtains =e violet Sad eho Rated Modded owed bk ck woe 5 57
Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

Short Story

Leaving the: Fart: 2-045 esate be tde eee ee bse wes 35
Myrna Marler

Novel Excerpt

The House Away from Home ... 2... cc ee ee ec ec eee 84
Marilyn Brown

Drama

CONTESSIONS: 6 2s 2s we sdeicens bee Se 6 wh ore be eu ee See Seale 97

J. Scott Bronson

pttirrmtrerernenratnateremanemiar cit mira atemertenncermermenteettane RC EAN RITA Referrer eter retreat ty meter re ne etm

Interview

An Interview with John Bennion ...................

Poetry
Ordination Day gcx54%5.0 geace-d sree v ayacuiaace aaa xk ae
Joel Baldwin

WYANSCEN GEHL 5.9 Since a besieana eS Bow Alot Sa Gnd a eve awe
Paul Swensen

STOW ceca ncatth spear i bk ae ave We ae aetid pawn ena sane ee naeeeee
Jerry Johnston

Book Review

“The Paradox of Salvation” a Review of She Needed Me
Dy Walter Rin -easiavis nat cial ort dt eerie aortas
Valerie Holladay

Letter from the Editor

Where Are the Mormon Writers?
Tory C. Anderson

VER A DECADE AGO, DURING THE LAST WEEK OF AUGUST, I WALKED
OO: an amphitheater-style classroom in the Tanner building and
found a seat. It was the first day of class and I wasn’t sure I was in the right
place. Soon, however, the instructor entered and said that this class was
American History 121 and that he was Michael Quinn. I had heard from
a source which I cannot remember now that Michael Quinn was in
trouble with the University for something he had written about Church
history. I was not concerned with things like that at the time, but I re-
member I was mildly interested in what a man who was in trouble with
the institution he worked for would be like. From the first day I found him
unpretentious, warm, fair, and genuinely interested in American history.
His interest was contagious and I have been enthusiastic about American
history ever since. The class was large and he has no particular reason to
remember me, but he can count me as one of his teaching successes.

Since that class I have casually followed Michael Quinn’s life through
newspaper stories, magazine articles, and lectures. Just recently I read a
speech that he gave at Dixie College not too long after his excommuni-

Tory is the editor and publisher of the Wasatch Review Intemational. He lives with
his wife and children in Provo, UT.

Wasatch Review International / 1

Tory ¢C. Anderson

cation from the Church. As he began this speech he bore one of the
strongest testimonies I have heard of the restored gospel, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, the Godhead, and the present day leaders of the
Church. Then he added something about the Mormon culture I found
very profound:

Although I’ve been excommunicated from the LDS church, I
remain a Mormon in heritage, culture, and belief. I was born a
seventh-generation Mormon, and remain so. Mormon cul-
ture—with all its strengths and weaknesses—is my culture. The
Mormon people—with all their triumphs and shortcomings—are
my people. Leaving aside matters of faith, I’m still a Mormon for
the same reasons that secular Jews (even the atheists among them)
are still Jewish. (Sunstone, June 1994, 67-68)

This stands out in my mind because for years I have been interested in
the Mormon culture—interested in whether there really is a substantive
Mormon culture. When I speak of searching for a Mormon culture, I
speak of trying to find something similar to the Jewish culture. I am not
an anthropologist who has studied the Jewish culture. I do not have any
Jewish friends nor have I lived in a Jewish community. All I know of the
Jewish culture comes from reading literature (mainly creative) written by
Jews. This literature paints a picture of a culture that is fascinating, a
culture rich in history and tradition, and, perhaps most importantly, a
culture made up of extreme diversity.

Perhaps it is ironic, but in this literature, in spite of the diversity, I find
a sense of community. For example, Chaim Potok’s The Chosen deals with
two Jewish boys, Danny and Reuben. Danny is a Hasidic Jew who dresses
in the traditional way, complete with skull cap and long curly locks on
each side of his face. Reuben is a modern Jew who dresses like other

Americans but who is conscious of and loyal to his religion and heritage.

Wasatch Review International / 2

Here Are the Mormon Writers?

He desires to become a rabbi. The teader can see a considerable differ-

ence between the worlds of Danny and Reuben, but even so, both char-
acters are Jewish—they just represent different neighborhoods in the
Jewish community. Of course the characters involved in the story (and
perhaps those involved in real life) don’t see it so simply. To Danny and
the other Hasidim, Reuben is “goyim,” an impure Jew with whom asso-
ciation is not desirable. Although Reuben does not look down upon the
Hasidim, he does resent being seen as inferior to them due to his different

style of Jewish life.

In my view The Chosen is something of a masterpiece. What makes it
a masterpiece, besides the author’s skill as a writer and depth of under-
standing, is his exploration of the Jewish culture (centering on the schism
between Danny’s world and Reuben’s world) without preaching his ver-
sion of Jewish philosophy while using Danny and Reuben as his tools.
Danny and Reuben are the end product of the story, not the means to a
politico/religious ending favoring the goyim, the Hasidim, or neither. Po-
tok approaches both characters as if he doesn’t believe one of them could
be more right or could have a better way of life than the other. To Potok,
both ways of life exist and thus both deserve to be studied. And as an
artist who wants to write a novel, Potok realizes that he must take the
differences between the two philosophies of life and create a plot that
helps the reader understand more fully both characters (not to choose
one over the other) and do this in a beautiful way. Potok succeeds and
creates a book that adds worlds of understanding to my experience, and
he does it in a beautiful manner.

There are many books just as fine, just as beautiful, written by other
Jewish authors. Obviously the Jewish culture is substantive enough to
create such writers and such literature. I believe what makes the Jewish
culture substantive enough to produce fine literature is that it is diverse

Wasatch Review international / 3

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Tory ¢. Anderson

enough to create conflict among members of that culture while being
cohesive enough to retain its unique identity.

If the literature that a culture produces is a valid measure of a culture’s
substance, depth and richness, then it appears that the Mormon culture
does not compare to the Jewish culture. The majority of Mormon litera-
ture is barren of the conflict that explores the Mormon culture and de-
void of true diversity. The majority of the literature suggests that although
there are millions of Mormons on the earth, all of them can be repre-
sented by two individuals (one growing stronger in the Church and the
other growing weaker). The depth, richness, and diversity in such litera-
ture is lacking, which makes the underlying culture look mediocre. It’s
true that each of the books written premier different characters in various
settings, but most of the books I have read deal either with a character
who overcomes great odds because of his faith in the gospel and loyalty
to the Church, or with a character who finally finds peace when he comes
to accept the truth of the gospel and the restored Church. No matter
what gender, color of eyes and hair, race, or time period on earth, the lack
of conflict and diversity produces pretty much the same story.

In spite of the literature it produces, I don’t believe the Mormon cul-
ture is so shallow. The Jewish culture is built on its history. Mormons have
a tich history too. Even though our history doesn’t cover the thousands
of years that the Jews’ does, there are striking similarities (although some
in miniature): belief in a living god and a savior, revelations, prophets,
miracles, persecutions, exterminations, temples, exoduses, and loyalty to
the faith even when threatened by sure death. But the big question is,
what about diversity? Is this where the similarities end—the Jewish cul-
ture has it and the Mormon culture doesn’t? Although the Mormons are
yet a small, young culture, the diversity is there. Whether orthodox Mor-
mons like it or not, all the splinter groups from the RLDS Church to the
polygamous factions in southern Utah are products of the LDS culture.

Wasatch Review International / 4

Where Are the Mormon Writers?

The inactive family living around the corner and the nonmember family
living in the middle of a Mormon neighborhood have much to do with
the Mormon culture. However, it is the diversity produced by what we
could term as the orthodox core of Mormons (the mainstream Mormons
you find at Church each Sunday) that is the most interesting to me. Ata
distance, and even up close, mainstream Mormons look homogeneous.
Even those living within the culture are often unaware of the diversity.
Perhaps this is why most of the literature (especially creative literature) is
vanilla in nature—the authors are incapable of seeing the full possibilities
of each character’s being.

So what does it take to write good Mormon literature? It takes a person
who has grown up within the culture but who has the ability to step to
the outside to observe—without loss of faith in the restored gospel or loss
of love for the Mormon people—to see the beautiful human diversity that
makes up the Mormon people. Unfortunately, this kind of person does
not come around very often. This is because the person who can clearly
see his own people is often rejected by those people as a rabblerouser, a
troublemaker, a heretic. Ironically, the kind of people I am referring to are
driven to study their culture by love and fascination for their people.
These people are able to create art so beautiful that it crosses human
boundaries and draws all honest hearts.

The Mormon culture has known only one such writer. Her name is
Maureen Whipple. Maureen’s masterpiece is The Giant Joshua. The novel
was written nineteen years before my birth (1942), but it took me thirty-
three years after my birth to discover it. I started the Wasatch Review In-
ternational because of my inability to find creative LDS literature that
explored our culture. What I did find was literature that was either propa-
ganda for the Church or a reaction against the Church, neither of which
is good literature. Both kinds of literature read like student newspapers

with their many arguments for or against an idea but none of which have

Wasatch Review International / 5

Tory ¢. Anderson

any more depth or meaning than last year’s fashions. But where was the
author with enough love and maturity and skill to explore each member
of a culture as a human being, without succumbing to the temptation to
evaluate that character’s point of view or way of life? Maureen did this
very thing. In The Giant Joshua, a novel written 52 years ago, Maureen
did what has not been done since— he wrote a novel that can be proudly
held up to Mormons and non-Mormons alike that says: “Here is the Mor-
mon culture. Here is a people worth your study. Here is a people who will
stun you with their strengths, their weaknesses, both of which make up
their worthiness; here is a people deserving of your love.”
In The Giant Joshua, Maureen Whipple strips each character bare and
we see their public and private parts. Maureen created LDS characters
that transcend the good Mormon/bad Mormon stereotype- I never saw a
single good or bad Mormon in the entire book, but whether it was
Brigham Young, John D. Lee, Clory MacIntyre, Erastus Snow, or Abijah
MacIntyre, I saw only human beings whose personal versions of Mormon
beliefs caused them to interact with the world in a unique and fascinating
way. Each character is three-dimensional enough for the reader to find
reason to love and hate her or him. As I experienced each character’s life
I felt new dimensions to my own Mormonness form. These characters
weren't used to preach for or against the Church; they were just individ-
ual Mormons whose diversity was set off by their sense of community.
Any character in The Giant Joshua would suffice as a good example of
Maureen’s ability to create a complete LDS character, but one of the best
examples is Abijah MacIntyre. Maureen makes the difficult job of creat-
ing a three-dimensional LDS character harder when the first picture she
paints of Abijah MacIntyre, one of the novel’s major characters, is a pic-
ture of a joyless, self-righteous, lustful man. Distraught over the joviality
of the members of the company he is guiding to St. George, Abijah has

Wasatch Review International / 6

Where Are the Mormon Writers?

these thoughts toward a coupl 1
ple who have carried their si i
300 miles of wilderness: saa a

The thing that Abijah couldn’t understand was that although Eliza
and Charles, her husband, had for the entire Sioath of the journe
been sleepless with worry over this, their first child, and Eliza foe
just out of her bed from having it, you might say, when they started
and although between the two of them they had walked with fa
child on a pillow for every step of the three hundred and fifty miles
over deserts and rivers and mountains, ice and snow and bitter sleet
and now, clogging sand, although they had done all this, they still had
time to dally and joke. You would have thought they'd be sobered b
now, as become those whom the Lord chasteneth. .

His self-righteousness comes naturally and without any seeming affec-
tation. While introducing himself to John D. Lee (infamous for his role in
the Mountain Meadow Massacre), he says, “I was President of the First
Quorum of the Seventies in the Nineteenth Ward in the City, Brother
Lee.” And, on another occasion when the pioneers are singing wile trav
eling, “Abijah smiled and lifted his thundering bass in song. In spite of h
giddiness, Clory was a little soldier; and, of course, being married to in
was going to make a lot of improvement in her.”

Our sense of justice, fairness, and morality is offended when we learn
aut Abijah has taken for his third wife the girl he has raised for the past
fifteen years (an unofficial foster daughter). She is only seventeen and
Abijah has a son nearly that same age. It’s true that the marriage wasn’t

Abijah’s idea (it was suggested by Brigham Young), but we'd like to pre
tend that a man of Abijah’s stature (“I was president of the First eee
of the Seventy in the Nineteenth Ward in the City”) didn’t have such a

strong sexual drive:

Wasatch Review International / 7

Tory ¢. Anderson Where Are the Mormon Writers?

It was enough to have to raise her without having to marry her.
But at that thought and the sudden remembrance of her white skin
and the scolding-locks of her black hair crisping on her soft neck
below her bob, a familiar compulsion gripped Abijah’s loins. oe
repressed it sternly as befitted a secret weakness. There was a time

Although Abijah feels bad that he was so rough with her on their first
union, his sexual desire for her is not abated nor is his ability to control it
| increased. His relations with Clory become the talk of the camp.

Erastus dreaded the job before him. Abijah was one of this own
High Council, one of his right-hand men. He looked at the earnest
bearded faces of his High Priests—he had called together all the Mel-
chizedek quorum, to which Abijah belonged—and wondered how to
begin. ‘Ptsahh’. ..

‘If our women are willing to consecrate their lives to the duty of

and a place.

Later, while Abijah and ‘Clory are out looking at some land together,
what starts out as a fun, loving, tender moment, turns into what some
would call rape when Abijah loses control of his strong sexual desire for

Clory.

‘Rub some on mine,’ Clory said, and held out her hand to him.
Brushing the flour over the small, calloused palm Abijah was un-
expectedly conscious of how fragile she was, how lonely she must
sometimes be in the long evenings in her wagon box listening to
the coyote chorus. :

Dropping the box, spilling the flour across the sand, he leane
over and kissed her. . F

‘Clor-rinda, bairn,’ he breathed, gritting his teeth, his nostrils
flaring, ‘Clor-rinda, Clor-tinda.’ .

Clory struggled up from under that embrace with a look in her
eyes like a wild thing’s startled wonder just before the instant of its
flight. But Abijah was abruptly a man surrendering to a long want,
and his lips were greedy. .

The girl, drowned in his urgency, could only push futilely at his
strength, turn her head away...

This is it, thought Clory; this is what it’s all about. Where were
all the stars Rolph had exploded in her heart? Where the ecstatic
pother one read about in all the stories? Just Abijah suddenly like
a man gone mad and her own wild alarm at the touch of his hot
flesh. This, she thought, is what they meant by obedience...

Wasatch Review International / 8

motherhood, to this end sacrificing earthly pleasures . . . the least a
man can do is’... ptsahh . . . ‘be temperate in his habits.’

(He regretted the slow red creeping up Abijah’s cheeks.) . . .

Erastus walked home with his arm in a brotherly link with Abijah’s.

‘Women are .. . women, Brother Mac: any kind of’... ptsahh! . . .
‘favoritism may cause backbiting and evil speaking . . . besides, you’ve
got three wives, man! You're acting like Thompson’s colt who swum
the river to get a drink!’

Abijah was like a small boy caught stealing apples, but stubborn,
too—he’d be damned if anybody ‘ud stop him as long as the apples
were sweet to his palate! But walking to Clory’s wagon box that night,
darting defiant glances right and left at the innocent sagebrush, he
was nevertheless wondering uneasily if anything he enjoyed so much
as sleeping with Clory could be right. He resented women, anyway,
because he thought in his heart they were the one means of keeping
him from being absolutely pure . . . His favorite sermon was on the

theory that behind every sin man ever committed you could find a
woman...

As Abijah continues toward Clory’s tent, fostering his bad attitude,
Maureen shows us Clory, who, instead of being the victim or the heroine

Wasatch Review International / 9

Tory C. Anderson

most authors would be tempted to create, shows us an LDS girl who,
although not happy with the way things are going, is dealing with it.

Clory . ... wanted to be a good wife to Abijah . . . If only he’d not
be so scary and stern... maybe she was bad for thinking anything
so sacred might also be fun... but if only he’d play alittle ... When
Abijah stamped over to the bed, she raised herself up on one elbow
and twinkled at him.

‘Well!’ she cried, the little flute notes in her voice,‘Well, my
dear! I’ve put on the pink satin sheets for us tonight!’

Abijah merely glowered at her and went on struggling with his
boots. She looked a good pattern to make a wife out of, but even
the young curve of her breast couldn’t compensate him for the fact
that now she was making fun of him. He ground his teeth. She was
like a drug in his veins, and he hated her.

If Maureen were a lesser writer, the quotes above would clearly show
that she is creating Abijah to be the villain of the novel, the character she
will manipulate in order to manipulate us to hate him, to want to burn
him in effigy. I had no love for Abijah at this point in the story. I must also
admit that I was worried that The Giant Joshua was going to turn out to
be a novel whose author had a chip on her shoulder against the Church,
which would make it a bad novel (as bad as a novel written to promote
the Church). What gave me hope, however, was that Maureen, up to this
point, had given me insight to where Abijah was coming from. He wasn’t
nasty and mean just to be nasty and mean; he was a man who had his own
concept of what it was like to be a saint (something he wanted very much
to be) and he was fully aware that a saint he wasn't.

As the novel continues, Clory actually begins to love Abijah, a thought

some may find repulsive considering the view we get of him at the begin-
ning of the book. But through development of his character Maureen

Wasatch Review international / 10

Where Are the Mormon Writers?

shows us how this love could be. There is no sudden insight, no revelation
about his life that changes the way we see him, Maureen just shows us so
much of him that we see parts of him that we can love as much as we hate
the parts of him that we hate. For example:

The air moved with a faint, wayward sweetness as if it had brushed
_ some far-off field of wildflowers. And Clory noticed as she had done
before that the evenings seemed to bring windless currents in layers,
cooling her cheek here, and a block farther on growing imperceptibly
warm again.
Abijah filled his lungs and emptied them with a long, ecstatic sigh.
‘Aigh, what a nicht! Tae think when I was ca’ed tae this countr-ry
I said I wasna gaen! I must hae been daft!’

What Maureen does here is subtle and it is the subtlety that makes it
effective and good writing. As self-righteous and chauvinistic as Abijah

is, it is hard to hate a man who can sense the beauty of an evening as
Abijah does here. And she shows us more:

‘Aye, it’s a nicht for singing,’ he cried. ‘I remember . . .’

Clory knew what he remembered. The old days on the ranch at
Cottonwood before he had taken other wives and polygamy had fer-
mented his household, simple days of harmony and peace when eve-
ning ‘sings’ were as natural as laughter. Scotch dances in the South
Fort with the frolic of the fiddle and the wild, haunting skirling of the
bagpipes. . . .

By the time the moon came up they were all singing with such an
abandon of pleasure it was half pain. Clory’s fingers nimble on the

dulcimer. Rollicking melodies that tapped the foot and swung the
shoulder.

Wasatch Review International / 11

Tory C. Anderson

Free’s tenor took on warmth and roundness, ’Sheba’s neighing
softened, the boys’ young voices blended, a chorus of voices,
united, freed, pouring out grief and fear and hope to the stars.

When the last song had washed away pretense and resentment,
Abijah bowed his head quite simply.

‘For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song
of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with
a blessing upon their heads.’ And then, almost as an afterthought:

«.. Be ye kind to another, and tender-hearted.’

Again, in spite of himself, I see something convincingly good in Abijah.
There is no self-righteousness or piousness in Abijah’s prayer; it’s pure
responsiveness to the spirit of God. Maureen doesn’t just show Abijah at
his ugly times or his beautiful times, she shows him at the in-between
times that most of us experience throughout the majority of our lives, the
times when we are neither good nor bad, but are trying or at least wanting
to be good. At this point, Clorinda, in the more fulfilling stages of preg-
nancy, is angry at Abijah for punishing Free (his 17-year-old son) so
harshly. Abijah, hurt that she is angry, wants to speak to her and help her
understand how much he loves his son and her:

Abijah stared at her with weary exasperation. As usual, he
dwarfed the dugout, but she thought she had never seen his vitality
so dimmed. His eyes, red-rimmed from sleeplessness, were tired
and sick with despair. Even the wave she had watched him wet and
press in his hair of a morning was flattened and dull.

She observed him with cool detachment as he hunted for the
right words to say to her. One hand fumbled with the buttons of
his vest . . . and the skin across his knuckles was rough and
chapped. He’d had to give up his browned flour lately.

‘Come in to breakfast, Clorinda Agathy,’ he pleaded patiently.
‘Ye're only actin’ fulish. Don’t you think punishin’ him touched my

Wasatch Review International / 12

Where Are the Mormon Writers?

tender spot, too? But he maun be humbled back to the Lord. I hae
longed many times to unbosom my feelin’s to ye, Clorinda Agathy,
but...’

Her ankles were still pretty, anyway. She lifted her'skirts, her eyes
fixed innocently on his face, so that he could see her swinging pretty
feet, toes pink, nails like white seashells. There was a devil in her. She
wouldn’t have admitted the ankle-showing was anything but an ac-
cident for worlds. She looked at him with wide-eyed, ingenuous in-
nocence while she tempted him with the ankles swung back and
forth. And reflected that she’d dare him to get his passions aroused.

She saw by the way he gritted his teeth that he was fully aware of what
she was doing.

‘Eneuch’ he cried. ‘Ye’re shameless!’

He clenched his fists and started toward her, but then she backed
away from him, eyes wide, knocking over the chair.

‘Don't touch me! Don’t dare touch me! I’ll run away!’

He was bewildered

‘But Clorinda Agathy, I’m your husband. I’ve only been waiting .. .’

Maureen shows Abijah as a man. A good man who wants to be a good
husband, who wants his wife to be a good wife, who wants to have a good
marriage, who wants to have a good life. But in spite of his desire to do
good he is stymied by his own physical weakness, his philosophical weak-
ness, and by the weakness of those he loves. Much to her credit as a writer,
Maureen shows Abijah as a man who, in spite of his weaknesses, is good.

Although Abijah’s and Clory’s weaknesses make their marriage diffi-
cult, love does bloom and grow there. After Kissy is born (Clory’s first
child), Abijah has to travel to a distant town on business and Clory and

Kissy come along. On this journey they start to develop a closeness they
hadn’t experienced before:

Wasatch Review International / 13

Tory C. Anderson

Abijah could not resist the comfort of a good meal, the release
from pressure, Clory’s constant nearness, her determination to
please, and, with the stimulation of change, the flashing into life
of her old gay spirit; he thawed visibly and began to talk of little
things, odds and ends of gossip. It seemed good to hear his laugh
again. With the passing of the long, slow miles they drew together
as they had not done for more than a year.

Abijah is self-righteous throughout the entire book, but Maureen, cre-
ating a whole character, shows us moments of doubt or maybe it is wis-
dom. On the return journey they meet Orson Pratt, Jr., one of the original
settlers of St. George, but who is now an apostate (he became unsure
about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon). Orson is sick and strug-
gling on foot across the desert and Abijah offers him a ride.

Abijah silently handed him his own canteen and Orson took a
long, shuddering pull of the fresh water. Abijah waited a moment
and reached behind in the grub-box for one of the cakes. Orson
stared at it on Abijah’s outstretched palm. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered,
and began to eat it slowly.

‘I been grabbling potatoes in Cedar Fort,’ he said, chewing; ‘fif-
teen cents apiece for spuds no bigger’n a hen’s egg. My God
Brother Mac, my kids are starving! I seen their empty bellies swell!’

His mouth twisted suddenly and his Adam's apple shot upward.
Kissy on her mother’s lap stared in fascination.

‘But I won’t take any help from Erastus Snow! [’ll die first!’ His
bloodshot eyes narrowed fiercely. ‘You people don’t care if a man
rolls in a manure pile as long as he’s one of you!’

Clory, her heart going out to him, held her breath for fear Abi-
jah’s temper would lash out. But Abijah merely sat and stared
thoughtfully.

Wasatch Review International / 14

Where Are the Mormon Writers?

When Orson went to go, Abijah filled his canteen with fresh water,
gave him the gunny sack from his own canteen to wrap his feet in
divided the cakes with him. :

As they drove on, Abijah still did not speak, but there was perplex-
ity in the sunken fires of his eyes.

‘Ech,’ he said deep in his chest, ‘life’s an ugsome circle. A mon
hates ye, and ye hate the next mon because the first one hated ye...’

Clory did not believe her own ears. Could Abijah be growing old
that he would admit a doubt of himself or his place in the universe?

What makes Abijah so fascinating to me is that Maureen was able to
create in him a “human” man (a full member of the human race in gen-
eral) and a “Mormon” man (a man so Mormon that his world takes on
tones that non-Mormons wil] never see). If Maureen had not seen Abijah

beautiful like God, and then Maureen will show us where his attempts to
become like God become his own stumbling block.

A while after Orson leaves the wagon, the wagon turns over. After
Abijah and Clory crawl out from under that wagon they find Kissy “laying
where she had fallen, white as a dead child.”

Abijah was like a madman. ‘Help me, Mother,’ he said, holding the
child up, putting his ear against her chest, fanning her face. Not until
after did Clory remember he had called her ‘Mother.’ ‘T haven’t any
il,’ he said, ‘but’... He had always Prayed as if God were there beside
him, but now, placing his hands upon Kissy’s head, he pleaded with
such desperate eloquence that Clory leaned to kiss the horny knuck-
les. At that moment, with the blood of his wound, the dust of the
accident, the sweat of his terror still upon him, Stripping him of over-
laid emotions, stripping him to the core, she loved him. All her life

Wasatch Review International / 15

Tory C. Anderson

laid emotions, stripping him to the core, she loved him. All her life
there would be instants, lost in memory, when the authentic pas-
sion for Free returned, when the glow, the warmth, even a breath
of the old rapture brushed her and was gone like the falling of a
leaf. But she could live with Abijah. She knew it now. She saw
beneath the shell, and with what she saw, she could fashion a life.
Even in the agony of suspense, even watching the stillness of that
little body she adored beyond hope of heaven, something within

her rose and sang.

Abijah stopped speaking; the sun poured down; a column of red
ants portaged across one of the maroon water gullies. They waited.
And then there was the flutter of movement in the throat. They
waited, and Kissy opened her eyes and began to cry.

Later in the novel, Kissy does die. Abijah is on a mission in England
when this happens. Kissy’s death is slow and agonizing, and it nearly de-
stroys Clory to watch. Weeks after Kissy’s death, Clory gets a letter from
Abijah. She is excited because this is the first letter that is addressed to
her personally and not to all the wives. Her happiness lasts only until she

opens the letter and reads:

As to the death of our children, you know that Death continues
his work, and will till he reaches the doom of us all; I hope the fatal
hour will not find you unprepared. I want to ask you if you pray in
your families and with your children. Do you teach them to pray?
This trouble is God’s judgment on you, Clorinda Agatha.

Here Abijah is a man serving God on a mission, spiritual adrenaline
running through his veins, and because of it he is unable to see the trag-
edy of the death of a child, unable to see the pain and innocence of a
mother. And yet when he comes home and the spiritual adrenaline sub-

sides a little he is able to repent:

Wasatch Review International / 16

Where Are the Mormon Writers?

‘Clor-rinda,’ he murmured, holding her close, his voice hoarsen-
ing, ‘Clor-rinda, I hae wanted to tell ye for a long time aboot the letter.
I was wrang to tell ye Kissy’s death was a punishment. It...’

Then, indeed, she lifted her head to stare at him. Stared in the dim
firelight until he dropped his eyes. Could it be that Abijah was hum-
bling himself? All her heart rushed out in a flood of tenderness for
him—a child who'd confessed and was sorry.

The most difficult part of any kind of literature is the ending. So many
would-be fine stories are ruined by a happy ending. It is not that happy is
bad, but that the “happy” created does not ring true. Then there are the
bitter endings that seem to say nothing more than that life can be bitter
(as if they are telling you something new). Long before I got to the end J
was wondering what Maureen was going to do to avoid the meaningless
happy or bitter ending. It was clear that the ending would have to deal
with who is Abijah? By the end of the novel, what has Maureen created
in him? There is considerable variance of opinion about what Maureen
does with Abijah. Some think the ending is the only weakness in the
book. It isn’t hard to understand why some feel this way for, to put it
briefly, Abijah is called to be the Logan Temple president, but, because of
the laws and persecutions against polygamy, he is instructed to bring only
one of his wives with him. Because Willie, the second wife had died, the
contest is between Bathsheba, the first wife, and Clory. Abijah takes nei-
ther, opting instead to marry a young fourth wife who is more likely to
bear him more children (Bathsheba’s childbearing years are over and
Clory can no longer carry a child to term but is, nonetheless, pregnant
again). He more or less abandons Bathsheba and Clory and starts a new
life in Logan. Maureen gives us no reason to forgive Abijah for this. In
fact, because of the sentiment expressed by all who know Clory, Maureen
gives us reason to detest Abijah for this act of betrayal, this abdication to

Wasatch Review International / 17

Tory ¢C. Anderson

lust. But even so, Maureen again shows Abijah as being more human

being than villain.

But when Abijah came to tell her good-bye she was collected
again, armored in pride, going casually about the business of pre-
paring for bed, and when he stooped under the lintel the glance
she managed to fling him was indifferent.

Abijah was at a loss. . . Curse a fyllie, she had always left him
at a loss. He had thought of himself as going off in a blaze of glory,
kissing Clor-rinda’s tears, this hurts me more than it does you, but
the work in Logan will be hard and you need a rest, I shall think
of you down here as resting, a few sentimental reveries over the
past, aigh, the past, the past, we’ve had a good time, my lass, but
what will be, will be, and we maun think of us all as meeting on
the Other Side...

Instead, she was actually flippant. She made him feel like a fool-
ish boy . .. And then unexpectedly all their years together did
overwhelm him. His voice trembled, he forgot everything except
her nearness, and went to take her in his arms, but Clory was too
quick for him.

She held out a polite hand, and her smile in the shadows of the
lamp was hard and bright.

‘Good-bye!’ Flippancy to cover up hurt, never to let him know.

‘Good-bye while you're handy!’

Here Maureen shows us a little of both sides of Abijah—the side we
detest (“He thought of himself as going off in a blaze of glory . . .”) and
the side we love (“And then unexpectedly all their years together did
overwhelm him”). In the end, Abijah certainly is no hero, but, as shock-
ing as his abandoning Bathsheba and Clory is, he is no villain either. He
is a man struggling to live a religion that asksso much of him (much more
than it does today) and he is a man struggling with human weaknesses

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Where Are the Mormon Writers?

made more complex by that religion. (Bathsheba would have been his
only wife had he not been asked by Brigham Young to take a second and
then a third wife. His fourth wife was entirely his own decision, with the
encouragement of the bride.)

So what is Abijah in the end? He is simply a Mormon man struggling
with himself, his religion, and the world in a way so personal that no other
man will ever quite struggle in the same way. Abijah is part of the Mor-
mon community but he does not represent the Mormon community. Al-
though the quotes in this essay deal with Abijah, The Giant Joshua is full
of individual characters so truly diverse that it makes you wonder and
rejoice when you see them all together in the tabernacle singing hymns
and sharing testimonies and giving their lives for the community of God.

The Giant Joshua received glowing national reviews. It was placed in
the top ten on the nation’s bestseller list. In one poll Maureen’s popularity
ranked above Ernest Hemingway’s. After I read the book, there was no
question in my mind as to why it received such accolades. I’ve brought
this fact up with popular Mormon authors. Their response has been that
they have no desire to be published nationally, that they are proud to
write books solely for Mormons. Ironically, I find Maureen’s book far
more “Mormon” than their books. I think non-Mormons do too. A re-
viewer in the New York Times said The Giant Joshua was “rich, robust,
oddly exciting,” and that it “brings Mormons as close to home to the
reader as they have ever been. They are not only likable, but they have a
certain magnificence which fully explains their history.” I am not saying
that Mormon authors should write to get glowing national reviews. ’m
saying that books that are truly Mormon, that effectively explore the di-
versity and wonder of our culture, and are written with enough skill will
draw any heart that seeks for the beauty and experience that can be found
in any culture—such as I have found in the Jewish culture—whether or
not the reader is a part of that culture. I, as a member of the Mormon

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Tory ¢€. Anderson

culture, seek for such books because I know the Mormon culture is much
more than what the popular Mormon novels show. Maureen Whipple’s
The Giant Joshua, in my opinion, speaks more for the Mormon culture
than all the popular LDS books combined. I’m enthusiastically awaiting

for another author to do us justice again.

Wasatch Review International / 20

Ringing Up Zero
Tryn Paxton

ONLY WENT SOICOULD BE ALONE WITH MY DAD, THE TWO OF US HAD
had most of our best talks in the car, inside a bubble of steel and glass
where conversation is natural, intimate, confidential. That afternoon as
we sped along Interstate 15, traveling from our house in Escondido to-
ward San Diego, our talk centered on the books we were each reading.
Books are a kind of bond between my father and me, a secret he has
whispered in my ear. When I was young we spent hours reading together
in his den. On Sunday afternoons we would settle down on his couch,
and he would read to me from The Wizard of Oz, Through the Looking
Glass, or Pippi Longstocking. When I was old enough to write my name,
Dad took me to the public library to get a library card. When I was older
he often left books or articles on my desk for me to read. When I was
thirteen, I discovered The Scarlet Letter on the shelf in the school library.
I had heard somewhere that this book was about immorality, and immor-
ality (that favorite topic of MIA teachers and bishops) was just what most

Tryn Paxton is a former English teacher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Now she is the mother of a rambunctious toddler and is a writer during naptime.
She is married to her favorite playwright and friend, Robert Paxton.

Wasatch Review International / 23

Tryn Paxton

interested my adolescent mind. Dad noticed me reading the book and
questioned me about it. I think he was curious to know how much I un-
derstood. If he was amused by my answers, he didn’t show it.

Now, at eighteen, I still enjoyed discussing books with my dad. I had

been reading The Grapes of Wrath that summer, and while Dad and |
discussed Steinbeck, the thirty miles passed quickly beneath our speeding
car and we soon pulled into the parking lot of the Bishop's Storehouse. I
had been to the Bishop’s Storehouse before, but only for service projects.
Dad had been here many times over the past few months and knew the
routine. He greeted Brother Stay, the store manager, and the two of them
chatted for a few minutes. Brother Stay served in our ward bishopric and
had recently been hired to manage the Bishop’s Storehouse. He was a
short man, about my height, with gray hair that he combed straight back
so that it formed a ledge over his forehead. His voice was kind and pro-
fessional. I had dated his son Roger several times that summer. While Dad
talked to Brother Stay, I stood close by, wiggling my toes in and out of my
summer thongs and wondering if Roger knew my family received food
from the Church welfare system.

Inside, the storehouse looked like any other small grocery store. The
food was arranged neatly on shelves, and there were large refrigerated
cabinets with glass doors for the milk and frozen products. But there was
a difference: no cash registers.

Brother Stay already had the food ready for us. There were boxes of
oranges, apples, and bananas; two large bags of potatoes; another box
with carrots, lettuce, and onions; fourteen cartons of milk; packaged
hamburger; sacks of flour and sugar and raisins; a box full of canned
goods. I helped Dad carry the food to our car and load it in the trunk.
There was so much we had to put some of it in the back seat. Food to feed
a family of nine for two weeks amounted to quite a few trips back and

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Ringing Up Zero

forth between the storehouse and our car. When we were done, Dad
y

shook hands with Brother Stay and thanked him.

On the drive home, Dad and I didn’t talk much. After several miles of
silence, he said, “How did that make you feel—going there, I mean?” J
glanced over at him, wanting to see the expression on his face, wanting
to see the light blue eyes beneath the reddish-blond eyelashes. But Dad
was looking straight ahead at the road.

T looked out my side window and examined a housing development
under construction that we were passing. I knew Dad would wait for me
to think before I answered him. My conversations with him are always
‘filled with long pauses. Dad never hurries, especially in conversations
and his pauses always make me feel that his words are carefully ce
deliberate, accurate. So now he waited patiently for me to speak, while I
searched my mind for the name of the emotion I was feeling. There was
embarrassment, shame almost, and anger too, the kind that has no direc-
tion, no object. Most of all, there was guilt for not feeling gratitude, for
wanting to take the food that fellow saints had worked and sacrificed to
provide for us and leave it right there on the side of Interstate 15. I wanted
to tell Dad these things, to know if he felt them too. I wanted to tell him
that I didn’t blame him, that he had not failed us. But at the time J
couldn’t find the words. “Sad,” I finally said. “It made me feel sad.” Dad
nodded.

It was November of my freshman year at BYU that my parents called
to tell me my dad had lost his job as a computer systems analyst for a large
company in San Diego. I was concerned, but not overly anxious. Dad had
been out of work before and had managed to find another job. Besides,
life was too beautiful and exciting just then for anything to dampen my
spirits. I had entered the university and found a world that exactly suited
me—a world of books and ideas, of midnight talks with friends, of profes-

Wasatch Review International / 25

Tryn Paxton

sors who were enthusiastic about their subject matter and interested in
their students, of dating, of symphonies and plays, of Church callings, of
having my own checkbook. And at seventeen I was experiencing my first
autumn. My world had been painted over in rich colors, and I stood be-
fore it, breathtaken. Dad’s losing his job could not affect my new mole
during high school I had taught piano lessons after school and applied for
scholarships so that I could afford to come to BYU without burdening my
parents with the expense.

When I went home for Christmas that first year, nothing seemed much
different. Mom, always prepared and unbelievably organized, had done
the Christmas shopping before my dad learned that he was losing his job.
We had plenty of presents, a house full of relatives, good food, and that
familiar feeling of family strength and love that Christmas always brings
for me. The only troubling moment of that Christmas vacation was the
day Mom and I went out to lunch at our favorite taco stand. We chatted
over our usual beef tostadas.

“Pm worried about him,” Mom said. “He doesn’t seem interested in
sending out resumes or going to interviews.” Her eyes seemed foreign to
me. There was fear in them. “He’s content to sit in his den and read or
work in the garden or do things with the kids. I can understand how he
feels, but a family needs money to survive.”

Sometime after Christmas, when I had gone back to BYU, the bishop
called my parents into his office and urged them to accept food from the
Church welfare system. That way, he reasoned with them, they could use
their reduced income to make house payments and pay utility bills. My
parents, by then desperate to make ends meet, reluctantly agreed.

It wasn’t until I came home for the summer that I began to sense the
tension and strain that had been building in my family while I had been
away at school. Dad hadn’t found work in his field, but a man in our ward

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Ringing Up Zero

offered him a job as an electrician’s assistant. He came home exhausted
and sunburned every night.

My mother had heard President Benson’s message “To Mothers in
Zion,” delivered in February of that year: “Sometimes we hear of hus-
bands who, because of economic conditions, have lost their jobs and ex-
pect their wives to go out of the home and work even though the husband
is still capable of providing for his family. In these cases, we urge the hus-
band to do all in his power to allow his wife to remain in the home caring
for the children while he continues to provide for his family the best he
can, even though the job he is able to secure may not be ideal and family
budgeting will have to be tighter.”

Even though she has a college degree and a teacher’s certification,
Mom was determined that as long as she had young children, she would
not get a job outside her home. Instead she took in other people’s children
to babysit, somehow managing to still do everything she had done before.

When I read of Steinbeck’s Ma Joad in the Grapes of Wrath I saw a portrait
of my mother in his words:

Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes
seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted
pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman un-
derstanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position,
the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken.
And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear
unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying
them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they
looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up
laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm.
Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and
humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean, calm
beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and

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Tryn Paxton

cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as
remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know
that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply
wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to func-

tion would be gone.

Mom adopted a complete, undoubting faith during those months. She
believed that with enough prayers and fasting and righteous living, God
would ultimately bless us. Her husband would find a job. My family fasted
every Sunday, and while I was at school I fasted too. Mom often reminded
us that our father had always been a completely honest tithe payer; the
Lord could not shut the windows of heaven to us. The Lord is bound
when we do what he says, Mom told us.

Like Mom, I believed the promises of the scriptures:

“Ask and it shall be given you.”

“Whatsoever thing ye shall ask in faith, believing that ye shall receive
in the name of Christ, ye shall receive it.”

“Yea, 1 know that God will give liberally to him that asketh. Yea, my
god will give me, if I ask not amiss.”

“Behold, I say unto you that whoso believeth in Christ, doubting noth-
ing, whatsoever he shall ask the Father in the name of Christ it shall be
granted him; and this promise is unto all, even unto the ends of the
earth.”

The hard part is learning what to ask for.

“And please help Dale to find a good job, one that will provide for the
needs of the family.” I had known those words were coming, as they came
every night, except when Dad prayed. Before each family prayer, Mom
reminded us to pray for our father. To her these prayers were genuine,
insistent. She was like the importunate widow, wearying the unjust judge
with her pleas. To me the words had become vain repetitions. That night

Wasatch Review International / 28

Ringing Ve Lere

en Whom prayed \ wanted to scream, “Sia sang han? when de

came to the unwavering petition. L wanted to shock her into seeing, “Stop
throwing your frustrations in his face and calling it faith.” But 1 didnt

scream. { listened to Mom finish her prayer, listened to her pray for each
of her children and ask God to help us be sensitive to one another’s needs
and to send his spirit to be in our home. I was wearing shorts that night,
and the raised floral design on the linoleum was imprinting itself on my
knees. Mom finished her prayer. I didn’t say amen.

That was two summers ago. Now my dad works for an hourly rate at a
small office supply store. For a few months he worked for a company in
Los Angeles, living there during the week and coming home on week-
ends. But that was only a short-term job, and he hated being away from
his family all week. Sometimes Dad puts on the navy blue suit, white shirt,
and tie that are recommended attire according to his book Dress for Suc-
cess and goes to a job interview. He usually comes home very quiet and
tired and says something about losing touch with the computer world.
When my mom urges him to go back to school, he says nothing.

My mom babysits eleven children during the day, and our whole house
looks like a nursery. There is a crib in every room, even my dad’s den.
Mom loves the children she watches and they love her. She has been able
to save some money to help my three teenage brothers on their upcoming
missions, and she has even been able to do some missionary work among
the parents of the children she babysits. She is proud that there are no
debts and that our family is no longer on Church welfare. “We haven't
lost our home,” she reminds us, “and we have never gone hungry.” But
Mom is tired most of the time, and sometimes she loses all the feeling in
her right arm. When I talk to her on the phone she sounds weary, and
sometimes I sense that far back, behind the strength, there is fear.

The morning before I left to come back to BYU at the end of last sum-
mer, I drove my dad to work. I drove him partly so I could use his car that

Wasatch Review International / 29

Tryn Paxton

day and partly because I wanted some time to chat with him before I left.
I dropped him off in Rancho Santa Fe where he was doing some electrical
work, and then, since the ocean is only a ten-minute drive from there, I
headed toward Del Mar Beach. I parked the car on a side street and
walked down onto the sand. It was about seven-thirty in the morning and
everything looked gray; the sand, the water, the sky, the undersides of the
seagulls’ wings all blended.together. The only splotches of color were the
sweatsuits of the joggers who occasionally passed me. I took off my shoes
and dug my feet into the sand. I sat and listened to the waves and thought
about my vacation, my summer job, my family, and my plans for the com-
ing semester. Then, like a line running across the bottom of the television
screen during a program, a sentence came: Ask Dad for a blessing. Sud-
denly I felt restless, too restless for the sound of the waves and the gray
morning. I put on my shoes and went home.

Dad gave me the blessing early the next morning before my ride back
to Utah arrived to pick me up. I sat in the rust-colored armchair next to
the fireplace in the semi-darkness of the living room. Dad’s hands were
large and heavy on my head. The words came slowly, with long pauses
between sentences. When I was younger my brothers and I spent long
summer days boogie-boarding at the beach. We would paddle the sturdy
styrofoam boards out where the waves first begin to swell. Positioning
ourselves so that we faced the shore, we would grip tightly to the sides of
the boogie-boards and concentrate on the motion of the water beneath
us. At just the right moment we would become part of the motion of the
wave, feeling it break over our bodies and rush toward the shore, pushing
us with it. We considered the best waves to be the ones we could ride all
the way in until the sand washed over our legs. That morning as Dad
blessed me, the words moved inside me, swelling and then breaking, send-
ing a rush of joy through my body. I heard my mother sniffling softly from

Wasatch Review International / 30

Ringing Up Zero

across the room. She seemed far away. Dad finished the blessing and we
hugged. He hadn’t shaved yet and his cheek scratched against mine.

Last semester a friend invited me to see a movie production of Death
of a Salesman. Dustin Hoffman played Willy, an exhausted man, sinking
deeper and deeper into despondency, struggling to maintain his dignity
and manhood and sanity. After the movie my friend walked me home. It
was the last day of November, a transition between seasons. It had snowed
the weekend before, but most of the snow had melted. Only patches re-
mained to cover the matted autumn leaves on the ground. I fastened the
top button of my coat and searched in my pockets for gloves. My friend
was telling me about a high school play he had acted in. I was thinking
about Willy asking, “Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my
life ringing up a zero?” I watched the ground and imagined that the leaves
were soggy, oversized cornflakes that someone had covered with too
much sugar. Silently, I began to cry. My friend stopped talking about his
high school play and offered me his handkerchief. Neither of us spoke for
the rest of the walk home. I don’t blame him for not knowing what to say
or how to help.

Wasatch Review International / 31

Ordination Day

The dark blue suit was new,
and huge, to give me room

to move and to grow into.

It smelled like starched cologne
and followed stiffly through

the motions of reverence

it would be trained to do.

Sitting in a chair

grilled by Grandpa on the Holy

Ghost, I grinned like a fool, waiting

for those warm and heavy hands

as my sisters whispered; would God be angry
because I didn’t wear my shoes

since it was just my family?

My dad could not resist just one last joke
about my name as they closed in on me,

a cloak of slacks and jeans and manly scent
that crushed me with responsibility and
reminded me of my promises and name,
the blessing and the power that were to be,

of steps that I would take to greater things.

—Joel Baldwin

Joel, a 1994 graduate of Brigham Young University, currently lives in Orem, UT,
and works at National Applied Computer Technologies as a technical writer.

Wasatch Review International / 32 Wasatch Review International / 33

Leaving the Farm

Myrna Marler

HEN EVE AND BUD ELOPED IN THE SUMMER OF 1956, BUD’S FATHER
Wis them he would annul their marriage unless they followed his
orders. “You can live on my summer estate in Hawaii. I need a
groundsman and housekeeper, someone to look after the place. I’ll even
pay you. But,” he added, and to Eve’s way of thinking, it was a big but,
“there will be no babies until you can support them yourselves.”

At these edicts, Eve and Bud had moved their heads up and down in
unison like silent marionettes. What was the loss of a little autonomy in
exchange for life in paradise? True, the estate was a small banana and
papaya farm in the back woods of Punaluu, and they would be isolated

Myrna, her husband, and their seven boys have lived and worked at BYU Hawaii
for the past seventeen years. Myrna finished her undergraduate work at BYU
Hawaii in 1986. Myrna has been teaching freshman composition, library and re-
search writing, survey of literature, and creative writing classes at BYU Hawaii as
a special instructor ever since, as well as working part-time as an academic advisor
for the Division of Language, Literature & Communications. Having recently
completed her master’s degree in American Studies, she is now close to finishing
the coursework for a Ph.D in the same field at the University of Hawaii.

Wasatch Review International / 35

Myrna Marler

from civilization as they knew it. True, groundsman meant weed puller
and lawn mower, and housekeeper meant dishwasher and furniture
duster. They knew that, but they were teenagers. Bud’s father had the law
on his side. He could dissolve their new union any time. He controlled
the checkbook, he could call the tune, and Eve and Bud would dance his
jig.

Bud’s father was a handsome man, self-assured, and used to having his
own way. And Bud, in fact, being his youngest son, practically worshipped
him. The man was the matchstick magnate of the world, the first to see
the future and diversify into disposable lighters. So instead of being
burned when matchstick sales fell as electric stoves took over gas ranges,
and heating oil replaced fireplaces, his business had boomed. Indeed, his
successes were legend. In the face of such authority, young Bud was not
one to quibble over details. His father had nodded his great silver head
and repeated his decree one more time before exiting to disappear again
to his home on the other side of the world. He had taken them to the tiny
plantation in Hawaii, established them on the estate, showed them where
the dishrags and hedge clippers were, then stood at the door to utter a
final word of caution. “Remember,” he intoned, “No babies.” He paused
for a moment as if to reconsider that rather impregnable statement, then
added, “Of course, you can decide for yourselves. But as far as I’m con-
cerned, if the rabbit dies, your goose will be cooked.”

“Ha, Ha, very funny,” Eve didn’t say.

“Dad,” Bud said, “We know all about birth control.”

Bud's father frowned as if they had no business knowing how to make
babies, let alone prevent them. Further, Eve suspected that her father-in-
law’s birth control method of choice would have been abstinence, a
method that required self-control, a quality he much admired, and one
that didn’t require a knowledge of esoteric chemical barriers or excursions
into the commercial world. But his hat and umbrella were in his hand, a

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Leaving the Farm

white limousine was poised in the driveway, and it was time to say good-
bye. “You kids keep in touch now,” he said. “Don’t call just because you
want something.”

Bud gave him a pained expression. Eve knew he didn’t really want his
father to leave at all. Bud would be happy if his father moved into the
guest room full-time and directed his conflagrations from there. He knew
that his rich and powerful father loved him and liked basking in the light
of increased self-esteem whenever he got the chance to be near his father.
And Bud liked hoarding the little nuggets his father dropped about his
business affairs and his future plans for expansion. His father had never
actually said so, but he hinted often enough that if Bud played his cards
tight, a nice place in the business might well open up for him some day.
Eve had observed that Bud’s father wasn’t one to hand out easy promises
like bits of candy on a silver plate. Rather, he seemed to be of the old
school, the one which believed candy to children should be preceded by
their good deeds. In fact, Eve was often to remark to herself over the next
two years, his willingness to settle them both on a small tropical farm,
then leave them with nothing much more to worry about than coming in
out of the rain was most out of character.

Bud loved the place from the beginning. The banana and papaya
groves stretched out behind the big house, the trees lined up in neat rows,
bulging with fruit. Bud liked digging around in the red dirt, mulching, and
raking and fertilizing, like a child turned loose in the ultimate sandbox.
He’d always had an affinity for growing things, having raised his own corn
and peas since he was eight, and Hawaii was perfect for him because, as
Eve sourly noted, everything, even mold and various fungi, grew there
whether it was supposed to or not. On one of his trips to town in the
pickup to unload extra fruit at the farmers’ market, Bud had bought him-
self a German Shepherd and named it King—after his father, Eve sup-
posed. Before long, the dog followed him everywhere. Bud took to

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Myrna Marier

wearing a straw hat to keep the sun off his head, and a red bandanna to
wipe away his perspiration. In the evening, when the breezes finally beat
back the heat of the day, he’d walk up to the path to the house where Eve
stood waiting. The hat would be in his hand and the sweat-drenched
bandanna wrapped around his forehead. Dust had streaked into mud on
his damp skin smearing his bright young face. Seeing her, he would wave.
The dog would jump and bark. “I love gardening!” Bud would shout, and
the roosters and peacocks would scatter at the sudden sound of their
voices. Normally, the only sounds Eve heard during the day were the
broken songs of mynah birds, the clucking of chickens, the rattle and
whisper of coconut fronds, and winds gusting through the valley.

Eve herself rattled around in the big house dusting what seemed to be
a thousand figurines and other art objects gathered from her father-in-
law’s trips around the world. She had always wanted to live in a mansion,
and now, finding herself in charge of this sprawling plantation house, she
earnestly vacuumed rugs, and scoured bathrooms. When the house was
clean, she ventured outside and picked the guava, the passion fruit, the
avocados, oranges, and lemons that grew without volition in the yard.
She bought cookbooks, learned to make guacamole and tropical fruit
slush. She set the table with anthurium and bird-of-paradise centerpieces,
and wore hibiscus and plumeria in her hair. She eventually learned to feed
the chickens without worrying that they would peck her toes or fly up her
skirt, and she had Bud build birdhouses and a birdbath for some of the
mynah birds. -But even given Hawaii’s dust-laden breezes and mold-
spawning humidity, the job did not require her full-time care. So she
watched a few soap operas on television, subscribed to a few magazines.
She even took the pickup down into Honolulu and got herself a library
card and read books. One day she brought home a kitten, which she soon
transformed into an overfed cat, but it didn’t follow her anywhere. After
a couple of years, Eve began to feel she’d conquered this brave new world.

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Leaving the Farm

A baby would change things, she thought. This idea, once planted, like
everything else in Hawaii, burrowed deep, spread its roots, flourished.
Before long, as if some wicked witch had zapped her with a magic spell,
babies burst into her vision everywhere. They cooed to her from soap
commercials on the television, caught her eye from the pages of maga-
zines, beckoned from over luckier women’s shoulders. “We'll make your
life meaningful,” they said to her with round and innocent eyes. “You'll
learn things. Why aren’t we born yet?”

She said to Bud one evening, “It’s been a few years. Don’t you think it’s
about time we started our family?” They were lying on the bed, the night
breeze flowing in through the open lanai doors across their naked bodies,
while the ceiling fan swooped lazily overhead to discourage the mosqui-
toes.

Bud’s stomach muscles tightened under her hand. “Aren’t you forget-
ting something?”

Eve tried to smooth the knots in his stomach muscles away. After
awhile, she said, “You mean your father. Maybe he’s forgotten what he
said. It’s been a long time, and he hasn’t been to see us since we’ve been
here.”

Although the checks had kept coming, his father’s failure to visit was
a sore point with Bud. But he was far from complaining about it. “Of
course, he meant what he said,” he told Eve. “He always means what he
says.”

“But why, Bud? Why won't your father let us have a baby? We love each
other. We should be able to do what we want.”

Bud sighed. “I don’t know, Eve. He says what he says. He doesn’t have
to have a reason.” Pause. “But he always does.”

Bud’s trust in his father was absolute. Well, the man had raised him so

‘maybe Bud had reasons she didn’t know about. But Eve thought that

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Myrna Marler

Bud’s father could have at least explained. Why should they have to
guess? After awhile, she kissed Bud’s shoulder. She kissed the tender side
of his neck. “Maybe we could have an accident,” she murmured. “He
couldn’t hold an accident against us.”

Bud grabbed her hand to stop its roaming. “Yes he could,” he said. “He
doesn’t believe in accidents.”

Eve looked up at him in the half-light shed by the moon outside the
lanai windows and she didn’t like what she saw. He was staring down at
her as if he had just discovered she possessed a potentially criminal mind.
“I couldn’t lie to my father,” he told her.

Sometimes he could be so annoyingly upright. He was so gentle bees
would walk across his palm and not sting him. He could train birds to sit
on his shoulder and give them names like Myrtle and Harry and Esther,
and they answered when he called. Even the cat liked him. Bud treated
her as sweetly as if she were part of himself, but he would never ever bend
the rules. “Ok,” Eve said. “Ok. You're right. Let’s just drop it.” She rolled
away to her side of the bed.

“I love you,” Bud said, but she didn’t answer.

He was unintimidated by the silent treatment. He knew when he was
tight. The idea sank out of his consciousness like a stone sinking to the
bottom of a deep pool.

But Eve couldn't seem to drop it. On her weekly grocery shopping
trips, she took detours into department stores where the aisles fairly burst
with pink and blue booties, fluffy nightgowns, delicate, lacy crib blankets,
nubby little sleepers, all doll-sized. She had to fight for aisle space with
what seemed like hordes of pregnant women, most, she thought, her age
or only a little older. Their bellies swelled with mystery against their ma-
ternity dresses. Eve made a point of looking into their eyes, searching for
clues to the secret they shared among themselves. The women looked
back at her, their eyes veiled, grown up, wise; or, they looked away as if

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Leaving the Farm

they didn’t even see her, the child bride. Then, Eve would stand and
brood over the bassinets swathed in gauze mosquito netting and picture
a small fuzzy head, maybe shaped like Bud’s, maybe hers, lying there,
sweetly sleeping, wrapped in the sun-dried, clover-scented receiving
blankets she would prepare. A baby was the next stage of life. While Bud
played at being a gardener in a climate where they couldn’t stop things
from growing, she was dammed, blocked up. And she could picture her
womb drying up year by year until finally it hardened into a little kukui
nut that would take a hammer to crack. She pushed the knot of anger
that picture created like a sour pomegranate deep into the pit of her stom-

ach.

One day Bud’s older brother showed up. He appeared without warning
on a Saturday afternoon as they lay on deck chairs beside the blue pool.
The cat continued to purr and the stupid dog didn’t even growl. Eve felt
a shadow and opened her eyes to find him standing there, regarding them
with an amused glint in his eye.

“Who are you?” she asked, not even afraid. He looked so familiar. Just
like Bud, only older, handsomer, with lines of experience, maybe petu-
lance, maybe cruelty, maybe with unholy laughter etched in his cheeks
and around his eyes. Bud was silent beside her.

He knelt beside her chair, extended his hand. It was manicured. He
smiled. “I’m your brother-in-law, Eve. Haven't you heard about me? Call
me Stan.”

He knew her name. Stan was the stuff of family legend. Bud’s father
had thrown him out years ago for being an incorrigible thief. At one time
or another, he had tried to steal just about everything her father-in-law
owned. Eve turned to Bud and saw fists of white skin lodged in the hol-
lows of his cheeks. His lips moved, searching for words. “You can’t stay
here,” he said after a moment. “Our father gave this place to us to care
for. He doesn’t want you here.”

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Myrna Marler

Apparently, Stan’s feelings could not be hurt. “Now, now,” he said,
getting gracefully back to his feet and standing so his body blocked the
sunlight. “My little peccadilloes took place years ago. I’ve knocked
around the world quite a bit since then and learned a few things. I intend
to make it all up with him when he comes to visit.”

You won't find him here, Eve thought, but Bud spoke first. “He hasn't
visited in a long time. He’s very busy.” She wondered if bitterness, disap-
pointment, or longing colored Bud’s tone.

Stan said, “He’ll come when he finds out I’m here.”

“No, he won't.”

“Look,” Stan said. “I need a place to stay.”

“You can’t stay here,” Bud repeated.

Eve said, “Bud, wait. Maybe Stan really does want to make things right
with your dad. Won't your father be pleased if you help bring the family
back together?”

“You don’t know what he’s like, Eve. I was small when he left, but I'll
never forget the way he split our family right down the middle over
whether to throw him out or give him another chance. People screamed
at each other and said terrible, unforgivable things.”

“But people change,” she pointed out.

“That’s right,” Stan echoed. “People change. Everything changes.” He
looked around. “Except up here, of course.” He smiled and his white teeth
gleamed in the’sun. “Come on, Bud. Give me another chance.” He looked
sincere to Eve. His eyes seemed to dance with candor. She added her
pleading look to his as they stared at Bud.

Bud hated to argue, but he said, “And sometimes people don’t change
at all. The answer is no.” He clamped his lips shut and wouldn’t say an-

other word no matter how Stan urged him to forget the past.

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Leaving the Farm

But Stan wouldn’t leave. Bud kicked him off the place, but he wouldn’t
go away. Where did he sleep? Under the porch? In the walls? Out in the
trees? No matter. The effect was the same. Every time Eve turned a corner
alone Stan was waiting. He could slip up behind her as silently as a snake,
and she wouldn’t know he was there until he put a hand on her shoulder,
his fingers as warm as the sun through the thin cloth of her blouse. She
soon found he was as easy to talk to as he was hard to discourage. He
echoed all her secret thoughts. Before long, she was letting him into the
house whenever Bud was safely out of sight, feeding him, listening to his
stories. It was something to do. About his father, he was less than rever-
ent. “He’s a dictator,” he said. “He wants to run everybody’s life.”

Eve thought he might be right. She told Stan how they couldn’t have .
children.

Stan was gratifyingly sympathetic. “He’s forbidden you to have babies!
How can he do that? Think about it, Eve. Has he got private detectives
hiding behind the curtains who jump out and say, ‘Quit that!’ whenever
you and Bud get in the mood for sex?”

Eve knew Bud's father was powerful enough to hire a legion of special
agents to watch over them, but so far he’d seemed to think his word was
enough to keep them out of trouble. Personal intervention was generally
not his style. “We owe him a lot,” she said.

Stan didn’t care about that. “You sound like you’re married to him, not
Bud.”

Eve thought about how much Bud loved his father, how much the man
had done for them. “In a way I am.”

“Are you kidding?” Stan said. “How can you be so naive? He’s just
trying to keep both of you under his thumb. When Bud gets older and
tired of you, our father will help him to find a more suitable companion.”

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Myrna Marler

Eve hadn’t thought of their arrangement with Bud’s father from this
angle. Perhaps the situation was a little more urgent than she had imag-
ined. “Bud will never agree to a baby without his father’s permission,” she
sighed.

Stan sounded irritated. “The last thing you need from Bud is permis-
sion. Consider the miracle of the straight pin. Think what that would do
to a diaphragm.” ;

Eve left the room. The sly suggestion was more than she could handle
in one sitting. Yet, unbidden, over the next several days a vision of her
rubber diaphragm, so vulnerable in its little case to sharp objects, would
float before her eyes. She could see herself sneaking into the bathroom
and poking holes in it with a tiny needle. The sieve effect would be invis-
ible to the naked eye unless the diaphragm was held up to the light, and
Bud wasn’t that careful. He’only ever asked her if she had it in, not if she
had mutilated it. She wouldn’t even have to lie. They could attribute its
failure to an act of, well, God. On the other hand, Bud’s father did say
there would be some pretty drastic consequences if they had a baby.
When Stan slipped up to her in the garden and whispered in her ear,
“Have you done it yet?” she shook her head.

“He said he’d punish us.”

Stan snorted. “Oh hogwash. He loves Bud. He’s not going to toss him
out into the cold, cruel world without a nickel, is he? Not to mention the
fact you'll be having Bud’s baby, an heir, posterity, and so on.”

She looked at Stan speculatively. “He did it to you.”

Stan shrugged. “That was different.”

She stared into his eyes, unable to look away. Was it? Was it worth the
risk? She’d never been one to take risks. “He did tell us we could decide

for ourselves,” Eve mused.

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Leaving the Farm

Now Stan became insistent, brushing up against her in the kitchen,
putting his lips next to her ear, breathing on the back of her neck, always
asking, “Have you done it yet?” Warning her with his concerned glances
that Bud could slip through her fingers like water if she didn’t hold on
somehow. Stan’s words scared her. He scared her.

So for the first time in her life, Eve took what she considered to be a
well calculated risk. The holes had virtually poked themselves in the dia-
phragm. And, on the appointed night, Bud had been most easily enticed
into unknowing procreation. In retrospect, Eve reflected, almost no effort
and even fewer brains were required to make a baby. That alone, she later
decided, should have given her pause. Because the moment she became
pregnant, it seemed, her body changed. Overnight, blue veins sprang up
across her breasts like a highway road map. They grew ponderous. The
nipples darkened. Her uterus, unused to all the new activity taking place
within it, expanded and contracted, making her stomach ache as if she
were having her period.

Then there was the nausea. In his knowledgeable and worldly way,
Stan had promised her there would be no nausea. He had said that morn-
ing sickness was a fiction, a thing of the mind. Morning after morning as
Eve bent over the toilet, then wiped vomit from her lips, she wondered if
all of Stan’s confident pronouncements were equally open to question.
Her eyes had been opened. Now, the formerly invisible became all too
evident.

Now, when she went to the grocery store, all the bright and shining
angel babies had vanished. Instead, she saw a red-faced infant screaming
in its hollow-eyed mother’s grocery cart, the mouth an open cave with a
little purple tongue flickering in and out. She saw a two-year-old, his nose
streaming unwiped snot, one shoe off and one shoe on, run careening
through the grocery store aisles, banging into-shopping carts and knock-
ing a Cheerios display all over the floor while a woman piloting a loaded

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Myrna Marler

shopping cart shrieked, “Tony, come back here right now. Right now! Do
you hear me?” Everybody heard her.

But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Lying awake at night, Bud snoring
gently beside her, Stan somehow suddenly gone, her mind roiled with
things she had forgotten while listening to Stan and blithely stabbing
holes in her diaphragm. Her own body was suddenly prey to a number of
new ills: toxemia, prolapsed placenta, breech birth, caesarean section,
stretch marks, and hemorrhoids. Then her mind turned to the baby re-
lentlessly growing inside her, and she suddenly remembered colic, ear in-
fections, whooping cough, measles, and pneumonia, midnight attacks of
diarrhea and sudden vomiting. Worse, she remembered childhood brain
tumors, leukemia, birth defects, Down’s Syndrome. Then, she thought
about summonses to parent-teacher conferences to hear about learning
disorders, nearsightedness, and maladjustment. She remembered kids
clumsy at sports who were picked last for every team, possibly her child.
She remembered cars slamming through occupied crosswalks, babysitters
who roasted infants for dinner, kidnappers, white slave traders, and child
molesters, all, all on the lookout for her child.

Her child might be a boy. She thought of nasty boys who broke win-
dows and painted graffiti on any empty surface, who used filthy words
both as a kind of secret language and a badge of masculinity. She thought
of grubby little males hiding behind the backs of buildings smoking filched
cigarettes and making rude noises at passing little girls. She thought of
scruffy boys with flying shirt-tails playing hooky from school, talking back
to their mothers, beating up on younger siblings, tying cans to the tails of
cats, and pulling wings off helpless flies. She thought of acne and raging
teenage hormones, and she shuddered. She remembered dope addicts,
hit-and-run drivers, sex fiends, mad bombers, serial killers—all of which
her sons could possibly grow up to be. She heard gavels pounding in
courtrooms and jail doors clanking shut behind them all.

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Leaving the Farm

Then she remembered whining little girls telling tattletales to get their
friends and family members into delicious trouble. She remembered how
stuck-up and clannish girls could be, running together in evil packs al-
ways making sure to exclude an unfortunate victim of the moment, prob-
ably her daughter. She remembered that girls thought their mothers were
square, cheap, tacky, and ugly as soon as they hit age thirteen. She re-
membered bad hair days, shoplifting for profit and adventure, teenage
PMS, slamming doors, and the unassuageable grief of no date for the
prom. She remembered date rape, unwed pregnancies, wife abuse, mar-
tied daughters who left shiftless husbands to return again to the parental
homestead with four kids in tow.

She realized that once her baby was born she was never again going to
be without worry in this world. She realized that some of her fears might
even come true.

Bud. She was furious at him for not waking up and sensing her grief
and fear. Why didn’t her hollow eyes, her prolonged stays in the bath-
room, the piled dishes, the dusty furniture tell him the world was about
to change? No, he scrambled his own eggs and ate alone; he cheerfully
went to the grocery store and made his own sandwiches and drank his
chocolate milk, petted his dog, stroked the cat, and stared at the world
through his sunlit blue eyes and patted her hip and talked about a flu bug
going around. She wanted to smash that unconscious innocence of his
with knowledge. She was beginning to hate the sight of his bland, unlined
face, his unclouded eyes, his unbitten lips. He needed to get a grip on
life—like she had.

“I'm pregnant,” she told him. They were standing in their beautifully
furnished living room. He had whistled “Zipidee doo dah, what a wonder-
ful day” all the way up the path that evening. His face actually went stupid
with shock. All the brightness drained away.

“Eve,” he said, “do you know what you've done?”

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Myrna Marler

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I certainly do. But it seems to me it takes two to
make a baby.”

Her tone took him aback. He looked at her warily. She could see the
thoughts behind his eyes changing, incorporating new and horrid ideas.
“Ts this one of those accidents we talked about earlier?”

She found she didn’t even want to lie to him after all. She wanted him
to know the truth, to share her misery in every sordid detail. She told him
all about the punctured diaphragm.

He was not too aghast to discern there was even more to tell. “Where
did you get these ideas?”

She bowed her head and told him about Stan.

“He’s a devil,” he said without inflection as if distracted. He was think-
ing of his father. “What’s he going to do with you?”

“Wait a minute,” Eve said. “Whatever he does, he'll do it to us, won't
he? Isn’t this all about what he’s going to do with us, right?”

Bud slowly shook his head. He looked drawn. “You're the one who
broke the rules, Eve.”

She talked fast. “Look, anytime you have sex you’re taking a chance on
making a baby. That’s part of it and always has been. I just increased our
chances somewhat. But the responsibility is still half yours.”

“People shouldn’t make these decisions by themselves,” he said.

“No one can make this decision by themselves!” she shrieked. She saw
that they were both standing with clenched fists.

He chewed on his lower lip.

“What are you going to do, Bud?”

He frowned as if choosing a future were another new and unpleasant
thought. “I don’t know, Eve. I’m going to have to think about it.” He
walked away from her into the bedroom. Later, he emerged, pajamas
tucked under his arm and said that he would sleep in the guest room.

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Leaving the Farm

Plenty of ways, he seemed to be saying, that he could manage very well
without her. She glared at the pajamas. He’d never needed them before.

Their bed seemed huge, a flat white plate that she lay upon alone,
served up like an offering to the impenetrable ceiling. She’d had reasons
for doing what she did. It wasn’t all Stan. She’d had all kinds of visions of
the future, but they had always included Bud. Then one night she felt the
baby move, a fluttering butterfly’s wing, a pulsing membrane under the
hand she had placed on her rounding stomach to still the ever-present
nausea. She thought about all the fantasies she’d had while mooning
around department store aisles, about the still-life paintings she’d visual-
ized as her children. Dolls. Then she thought about all the bratty children
she’d seen on the streets and in the grocery store. People. The trembling
life beneath her palm was a person. Growing. So was Bud. So was she. So
were they. Then she thought: What if Bud never cares about that?

He came into the bedroom one night, his tall form silhouetted against
the light from the living room, and stood just beyond the doorway. “Eve”
he said.

“l’'m awake.”

“I hate being alone out there without you.”

She sighed and pulled back the sheet. “Then come in here.”

He came closer, sighed himself. “My father’s going to disown us.”

“No he won't,” she said. “He wanted this to happen.”

“Why would he want us to disobey him?”

“Well,” she said, “two years ago, he didn’t want you to. Now maybe it’s
time to move on.”

He came a step closer. “But he’ll still throw us out of here.”

Eve said, “Probably. That seems to have been the deal. But we'll have
the baby.”

“Why can’t we have the baby and stay here, too?”

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Myrna Marler

“You figure it out,” said Eve. “You're the one who says he always has

reasons.”

He came around to his side of the bed where Eve had pulled back the
sheet and climbed in. He pulled Eve in to the hollow of his arm. “This
feels good,” he said. “So much better than being out there.”

“Now you know,” Eve said and buried her head into the delicious,
warm place where his neck met his shoulder.

After that, for awhile, they didn’t even think about Bud’s father. But
he seemed to be thinking about them. One day, his white limousine pulled
up in the driveway. Bud would normally have been overjoyed because it
had been so long since his father had been to see them. Instead he was
frightened. He turned panicky eyes to Eve’s burgeoning belly. “He’s going
to take one look at you and know you're pregnant. Quick, go put on
something big so he won't be able to tell.”

Eve gave him a look that would have withered grass. Faced with the
reality of his father’s presence, he seemed to have forgotten all the secret
joys they had whispered about together during the long, warm nights.
Hide, should she? She stalked into the bedroom and pulled open his
closet door so hard the hangers rattled and grabbed at Bud’s raincoat, a
garment that came below her ankles and covered her hands. She marched
back into the living room with as much dignity as she could while stum-
bling over a trailing hem.

Bud glared at her for a long moment when she emerged, then sank
down hopelessly on the couch. His father, looking large, benign and
handsome, stood in his white tropical suit in the middle of their living
room. He walked over to kiss her hello, and she smelled his aftershave,
sensed his kindness. He looked her over and raised a humorous eyebrow.
“Interesting fashion statement,” he remarked.

Eve smiled and let the coat gap open. Bud groaned. His father’s smile
sobered at the sound. He turned to Bud. “Just what’s been going on here?”

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Leaving the Farm

In Eve’s eyes, Bud was nearly babbling. “She did it. It’s her fault.” He
actually pointed his finger at Eve as if his father might be confused about
which woman in the room he was referring to.

Bud’s father turned to her. “Eve?” His eyes were so very blue, she
thought, and they seemed to drill right into her.

All her well-thought-out speeches evaporated under his stern gaze.
She blamed Bud a little less for his-retreat into childhood. She said, “Stan
was here. He talked me into it.” That wasn’t the whole truth, but the look
on her father-in-law’s face seemed to preclude further remark. She’d defi-
nitely liked it better when he was smiling. Eve went over and sat beside
Bud and took his hand.

“Where is Stan now?” he asked.

She hung her head. “I don’t know. I guess he left.”

Bud’s father looked grim. “He'll be back. He always seems to come
back.” He thought for a moment. “So you've decided to strike out on your
own, have you?”

Just as they feared. The man never went back on his promises. Then
Eve remembered Stan’s nickel-plated guarantee that Bud’s father would
be thrilled to get an heir, that he would not toss them out without a nickel.
It seemed worth a try. She said, “Aren’t you pleased you're having a
grandchild?”

“Yes.” he said, “I am.” His face was suddenly filled with both joy and
sorrow. Eve guessed the sorrow was for all the things that were going to
happen to them that they weren’t going to like. But he wasn’t going to do
a thing to make it easier for them. “But aren’t you pleased you're young,
bright, healthy enough to take care of it?” He wasn’t being sarcastic at all.
Disobedience was disobedience in his view.

Bud said, “Couldn’t you find a job for me?”

Wasatch Review International / 51

Myrna Marler

His father said, “I don’t think so. Not yet. I'd like to see how you do on
your own first.”

Bud said, “You're disinheriting me?”

His father shook his head. “You know better than that. I’ll be around
to see how you're doing.”

Eve had yet another vision of the future. They were going to be poor.
They would have to live in an apartment with furniture that other people
had used and worn out, with flaking paint on the walls and worn rugs on
the floor. The weather would get cold. They would have to pay heating
bills. She would have to shop at places where customers marked their own
prices and the pens would be irritatingly defective, and she would have to
buy generic brands. They would have to save soda bottles to get enough
money for Friday night movies. The neighborhood they would live in
would be filled with used bookshops, seedy mom and pop liquor stores,
and boarded-up service stations. Their car would be a junker with bald
tires and strange and frightening noises emanating from under the hood,
which they wouldn’t be able to afford to investigate, let alone fix. Her
baby’s clothes would be hand-me-downs, stained with other baby’s meals
and adventures. The few new ones would come from K-Mart. Her house-
dresses would fade. Bud’s suits would grow baggy. There would be no
room for dogs, cats, or chickens. Strangely, the prospect didn’t seem that
bad. “Pll make my own bread,” she told herself. “Pil learn to sew. I’ll hang

cute curtains on the windows.”

Bud, too, had been thinking. He looked his father in the eye. “Okay,”
he said. He put his arm around Eve and in doing so, he seemed to grow
larger and stronger. She leaned back into the warmth of his shoulder.

When his father left, Bud hugged him hard, as if the solid feel of the
man had to last in his memory for the rest of his life. When he finally
pulled back, Eve, too, stepped forward to be folded in her father-in-law’s
embrace. Surprised, she felt his tears on her own cheek. Now she wanted

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Leaving the Farm
to comfort him. Even matchstick bigwigs couldn’t control everything. “It
had to be done,” she murmured.
“Yes.” he said. “It was time.”

Thus, Eve and Bud set off to conquer the world on their own. Even so,
they had no real idea at all what they’d gotten themselves into.

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Transcendental

This high priced oral surgeon
Hangs a rusty pitchfork

On the wall of his reception room.
I’m waiting for my extraction
And I don’t need the distraction
Of wondering whether these

Are objects of torture

or object d’art.

I object.

I’m already into him (or is he into me?)
Forty bucks or more for a “consultation”
To preview the operation in excruciating
Detail. ’m also bummed that he’s

Made me choose between being
Numbed and paying extra for a

Local anesthetic. This from

A guy whose aesthetic for

Office decor is antique

Farm implements.

Wasatch Review International / 54

When his nurse finally puts me in the chair

(It’s taken several weeks to get there

Since the surgeon ran out on my

Appointment to attend a funeral—a former
Patient, probably—more patient anyway than me),
I’m not what you’d call relaxed. I’m

Feeling nostalgia for the efficiency

of dentistry’s Dark Age. I’m thinking

That by now I’d have long since been

Picked, or raked, or axed.

This feels just like the buzz ‘you get

From alcohol, she says, and gives me laughing gas.
From out of nowhere, enter Dr. Lind. The
surgeon is a stringbean Scandinavian, who
Asks—peculiarly—you ever been to

Goshen? I’m gulping gas, I’ve got my

Second wind. I know it’s somewhere

South, but cannot answer: He’s i

Poking in my mouth. Meanwhile

I’m bobbing on some timeless ocean.

Wasatch Review International / 55

He tells a story then, damnedest thing I’ve ever heard.
Land o’ Goshen on the shores of Utah Lake. Floating
Captive in my chair, I’m rapt for every word.

A rural Mormon ward. His friend lies dead. An

Open coffin. Cowboys in the choir. The bishop’s brow is
Furrowed. They sing a hymn of praise to coffee
Drinking ‘round the fire. The pews are filled with
Reprobates. As they pass the bier to pay their last
Respects, an old coot lights a cigarette, and says,

I hope he resurrects.

—Paul Swenson

Paul Swenson reviews books for The Salt Lake Tribune and writes film criticism and
media criticism for The Event. His poetry has appeared in Weber Studies, Ellipsis,
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and The Mormon Women's Forum Quar-
terly.

Wasatch Review International / 56

Plantains

Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

ONIGHT I AM FRYING PLANTAINS FOR DINNER, A LONG-POSTPONED
ij ares with the past. The plantains are black, fuzzy with mold,
weak at the stems, but when I slit them open the inner flesh lies slick and
pink along my fingers. It isn’t too late, after all.

In 1974 and 1975, I ate plantains every morning for breakfast. Gloria
fried them in oil and brown sugar, and their smell filled the house. I ha-
ven't eaten a plantain—-or smelled one cooking-since then; since | was
eleven years old, suffering for love, and playing tetherball near the banana
trees in our backyard where blind Tilio, the gardener, scythed the terraces
with careful strokes and clipped the edges with rusted shears. Near the
tetherball, on the marbled back porch, my mother once abandoned my
two-year-old brother to a dance with an upright lizard after she escaped
into the kitchen. Guilt mingles with laughter whenever she remembers.

The floors inside were marbled, too, kept slick and shining by the
maids. There were no hallways: the front door on the first floor and the
bedrooms on the third were separated by a large expanse of air and an

Lisa, a native of Ft. Collins, CO, now lives and writes in Atlanta, GA.

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Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

open, two-tiered staircase of smooth stone slabs. On the second floor I
whirled to Russian folk music and ate sweet plantains for breakfast. On
the third-floor landing my older sister Marion revealed one morning what
it meant that Mary the mother of Jesus was a virgin. This same sister
balanced a bucket of water atop my bedroom door on April Fool’s Day,
found a scorpion in her shoe, a bat in her bed, and a rabid dog whiffling
in the carport. She tape recorded a whooping cough attack for the benefit
of posterity. We can still listen to her gasping and retching, struggling for
air, as my mother calls in a high-pitched voice for my father.

In the kitchen, there was a place where you could lift up the counter
to reveal a square compartment underneath. The fairies danced there at
night. I never got to see them in person because even if] set the alarm, |
was too tired or scared to make a trip through the dark house to look. But
I did see fairy lights winking on a black hillside in Honduras. On a trip
from El Salvador to Copan, our car headlights went out on a mountain
road, and it was black, blacker than I’ve ever seen, except that from time
to time a tiny light would blink briefly here or there on the facing hill.
About the time we'd decide our eyes played tricks, another one would
blink.

When I was sick once, my mother brought me Harriet, the Spy to read
in bed. I was not as effective a spy as Harriet. I could never catch my
stuffed animals in the act: they rough-housed sometimes at the foot of my
bed, but only when I wasn’t there. My Sunshine Family dolls were more
dependable. I equipped their house with nutshell cups and bowls, mini-
ature tea kettles, and a well I made out of a tin can encased in dried salt
dough, complete with a crank to raise a tiny bucket on a string. The
Sunshine couple had a cute blond baby not more than six months old.
Sometimes they made love guiltily in their bedroom.

Our house was across the street from a golf course in an upper-class
neighborhood of San Salvador, El Salvador. Up the street, where the land

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Plantains

rose high and grassy then dropped back to street level as a jagged cliff, a
mansion was guarded by dogs and a spiked iron fence. Because of the cliff,
you couldn’t see the mansion by walking down our street; you had to go
around the block and look through the fence from the other side. In the
opposite direction, where our street ended in an abrupt and dusty gully,
grew a shanty town. Ragged children came from there almost every day
to get water at our house. Our cistern didn’t hold a limitless supply of
water, so we kept the faucet handle inside the house. When the children
rang the bell, we passed it to them through the bars on a tiny window in
the front door.

Children also crawled through the barbed wire fence that surrounded
the golf course to get water. I watched them do this early in the morn-
ings—when the air was still cool and quiet—from the balcony that over-
looked the street.-At that hour the golf course was an unruffled green
lagoon, becalmed except for the children who struggled briefly and ur-
gently against the barbed wire along the shore. I liked the quietness of the
balcony at sunrise. Early Easter morning I sat up there and read the Bible.
“Why weepest thou? Who seekest thou?” Jesus said to Mary after his
resurrection.

I was a very religious child. When a girl at school told me Mormon
sounded like moron, I was pleased she knew even that much about my

faith.

I taught Gloria about the Book of Mormon. Gloria was our cook, who
fried plantains every morning in oil and brown sugar and cooked yucca
roots to tender flakiness in the evenings. While she ate corn tortillas and
beans for lunch at the small table in the kitchen, I read her the scriptures
and explained them to her. I think she believed everything I told her.

The missionaries who often came to our house did not teach Gloria,
perhaps because she qualified as one of the “very poor” who were off-lim-
its to them, or perhaps because she was not interested in the message after

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Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

all. They came not to teach, but to eat the meals Gloria prepared for
them. Copious amounts of food disappeared from their plates before they
stood abruptly to say thank you and good-bye. Later, in Colorado, when
the missionaries came for dinner and stayed and stayed, my mother would
comment that the missionaries in El Salvador were hungry, but they were
never lazy.

At Christmas time, I saved up my allowance to buy five chickens and
some small bags of beans and rice, which I gave to the children who came
to our door for water. After the food was all gone, more children kept
coming. They kept coming until I wondered if I had been wrong to give
chickens at all with so many people in need of those chickens.

Once Marion, Stephanie, and I went with some little children to their
cardboard shack in the gully. I think we took along a chicken then, too.
John E Kennedy was smiling on the wall next to a crucified Christ. I
remember an old man and a dirt floor and a table. There were women,
too, with wide dry feet who were gracious in the face of our ignorance and
richness.

When women got pregnant, they did not buy maternity clothes. They
walked back and forth down our street on solemn feet, backs erect below
enormous bundles of sticks or urns of water, bellies tight and mysterious

inside their narrow dresses.

Our sedate neighborhood ticked peacefully below a warm, never swel-
tering, sun and—in the rainy season-glowed with bougainvillea. The si-
lence was interrupted only by the screeching brakes of the bottled water
truck that pulled up in front of our house like a giant, luminous beehive,
each cell a shimmering fishless aquarium; by the firecrackers (big as my
waist) that the missionaries exploded on New Year’s eve; and by the bul-
lets the neighborhood watchman fired at the rabid dog, in intervals, all
night long, after driving him out of our carport.

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Plantains

Downtown San Salvador was a different story. My first, terrified im-
pression of the place was from the window of a taxi cab hurtling from the
airport into an unbelievable chaos of automobiles, human bodies, and
three-wheeled bicycles. Clutching the seat with both hands, I prayed to
go home. But my father, an agricultural economist, had a two-year assign-
ment with US AID, and we stayed. I didn’t dream then that—years later
as a freshman at BYU-a class excursion to Mexico would be the trip home
I hoped for; that the market smells of rotting fruit and diesel exhaust, the
tangled concourse of bikes and buses, the sing-song shouts of street-cor-
ner vendors would provide absolute refuge from adolescent depression
and a steely Provo winter. What you live as a child, in happiness, becomes
home.

I was happy in El Salvador. I learned that bananas point upwards, not
down, when they’re growing on the tree. I found that kicking the boys in
the shins was the best way to gain control of a soccer ball. I learned that
mangos are better when eaten slightly green, before the tanginess evolves
into orange strings that stay between your teeth. I saw flying fish burst
from the water around me as I waded in the sea; watched for human
excrement on the beach. I learned that people can live wherever there is
ground; that some live in mansions guarded by dogs, but that cardboard
will do for a roof except in heaviest rain. I learned gratitude for my own
roof, especially at night, during storms when lightning exploded against
the tiles like a bomb going off.

In the end, I learned to love the descent from our quiet neighborhood
into the dirty bustle of the city below where sewers ran as open streams
and the fruits in market stalls were bright and invariably sweet. I have
since wondered why the Salvadoran people chose the word Guinda—sour
cherry—to describe the nighttime flight of women and children from the
bombs that rained onto rural land during the recent 12-year civil war. I

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Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

never tasted a sour fruit in El Salvador. Even the pineapples were sweet
in that country. And I never saw a single cherry.

During the war many neighborhoods in San Salvador were completely
razed as FMLN guerrillas took cover behind civilians and the government
bombed indiscriminately to drive them out. More than a quarter of the
population lost their homes during the conflict; more than 75,000 people
perished. But the San Salvador I knew was full of life and—at the hand-
craft markets—laden with miniature vases, cloth dolls, rough carvings of
horses and wolves, shell necklaces. My sisters and I considered ourselves
masters at bargaining. We always got a deal.

Riding along downtown in the back seat of our green Ford station
wagon that always smelled vaguely of gasoline, we’d burst into a loud
chant whenever we passed a Toyota billboard. “Tu!” (backhanding each
other), “Yo!” (slapping our own chests), “Y Toyota!” (flinging arms wide
in each other’s faces). We were engaged in this chant when the news
came over the radio that President Nixon had resigned. “Stop that,” my
father said. “Stop that and listen. It’s finally really happened.”

One evening after dark, we got lost driving home from downtown, and
found ourselves on a hilltop at a dead end. My father muttered to himself
as he shifted the car into reverse, into forward, into reverse to turn the
car around, but the metropolis glistened below like an underwater city of

mer-people. Magical. Opulent.

In fact, I got my first taste of real luxury in the San Salvador hotel
where we stayed for two weeks after our arrival. While my parents looked
for a house, we ate Continental Breakfasts at the bar, swam in the pool,
fooled around on the elevators. Once I got my hand caught when the
door opened, and for a split second thought it was gone for good. Another
time, Ernest Borgnine, who was judging the Miss Universe pageant, rode

Wasatch Review International / 62

up with us. He knew we recognized him, and told us so by staring straight
ahead.

By coincidence, another North American Mormon family was staying
at the same hotel. Later they were in our ward, but we first discovered
their presence when wads of paper began dropping onto our heads from
the balcony above ours. We got to know the three boys, who were around
our ages, when their mother had a miscarriage and their father brought
them to stay with us while he took her to the hospital. Only now, so many
years later, can I feel for the woman—watching a part of her future bleed
away on an unfamiliar bathroom floor in a strange land. At the time her
misfortune was an opportunity for me to have the time of my life.

We spent the day playing miniature golf and elevator tag, and I believe
it was that night I swam underwater from one end of the pool to the other,
heading for the lights that glowed from the sides like great fish eyes, telling
myself to always remember that bizarre and luminous glow. And I have. I
even remember that the water was so warm that the warm evening air felt
cold when you climbed out to stand on the diving board. I remember it
all. I see myself clearly, but ‘as from a great distance, with a mixture of
tenderness and disdain. Not long ago I read the testimonial of a Hondu-
ran woman who said she’d watched white, rich children playing in a pool,
and wondered how this could be, when her own children were slowly
starving outside the gates.

In Colorado, my sisters and I had roamed about our neighborhood,
played in the vacant lot behind our house, rode our bikes to school and
piano lessons. In El Salvador we were never allowed to walk alone, even
from the bus stop to our house. Gloria came to get us. Downtown, soldiers
with machine guns stood on the steps of banks, in parks, on street corners.
At the university, the students were always on strike. My father heard
from the peasants he met on his trips to the countryside that a massacre

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Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

of protesting coffee workers had taken place in a nearby village, but he
never found a reference to it in a newspaper. A woman my mother met at
a party complained. of the evil people trying to take away her rights and
her land. She was a U.S. citizen who, having married into the 14-family
oligarchy, resided in a resort home surrounded by her coffee plantation.

We have a photograph of my brother Christopher, two years old, at a
public pool, plump stomach in the foreground, gazing at a thin child
whose stomach is even more distended. My brother looks concerned.

On Saturdays, we sometimes drove to the United States embassy to
watch movies. Popcorn was not allowed in the theater, and a movie called
Warm December contained the longest kiss in history. When Dr. Zhivago
glimpsed Laura for the last time, he clutched at his heart before dying in
the street, while the baseball player in Bang the Drums Slowly spit tobacco
juice and died of cancer. The burning bush in The Ten Commandments
spawned dark, swirling nightmares that lasted for weeks, but the embassy
was a safe'place for love and death—unlike the sidewalk outside. A tall
Peace Corps worker named Mark, a friend of my parents, was walking
down this busy sidewalk toward the embassy when a man leapt at him
with a knife. Mark’s long arms saved his life. He held the assailant at a
distance that allowed only a half inch of blade to penetrate his rib cage.
There was no apparent reason for the attack.

One night my family drove to a regular downtown theater to see the
movie Paper Moon with Spanish subtitles. People were getting their beds
ready in the gutters as we walked along the sidewalk on the way to the
theater. There was a man without any feet. Tatum O’Neil was just my age,
and I thought she was Something Else: cocky, bad, and proud of it. I was
almost to the age of horrible anguish for my own squareness—but not
quite. On another occasion when my parents dropped me off downtown
with a friend to see a film of the Swan Lake ballet, I was a little smug in

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Plantains

the knowledge of my own sophistication. I danced to Swan Lake on the
airy second floor of my house.

Tonight, on my way home in heavy Atlanta traffic to cook plantains for
dinner, Swan Lake was playing on the radio. But my plantains aren’t turn-
ing out as soft and sweet as Gloria’s, although the smell is the same: the
smell of late childhood, when I worried that nonexistent breasts might
show through my undershirt, carried secret love like a wound in my heart,
and wrote code words like “clandestine” on pieces of curly tree bark
which I hid for my friends to find along the sidewalk by our recreational
club. Alison. Michelle. Elisa Ventura.

We ate lunch sitting in trees outside the Escuela Americana. The
school’s hallways were outside also, and when it rained you got wet as you
walked from one room to another. Classes were taught in English and
Spanish. Mr. Charlip kicked his chair into the wall one day when we
wouldn't be quiet.

I remember three other bad things that happened at school: One rainy
afternoon, I was running down the hallway full-tilt when a door opened
in my path, sending me and my books flying violently in ten directions.
Everything was black for a minute or two, but the keen embarrassment
lasted much longer than that. Then there was the time I lost my wolf’s
head. I’d worn the rough-carved beast on a string around my neck for
several months (whether I was in Sunday best or blue jeans) as a good
luck talisman. He was ugly, but I’d come to depend on him. Then one day
after recess the wolf was missing, and I spent several days scouring the
school grounds. Never found him. Maybe that’s why, on the same play-
ground, I hit the catcher squarely in the mouth with a baseball bat. I still
hear the horrifying, slightly sucking thud of the bat connecting with her
flesh. I hear her screaming.

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Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

Marion stayed home from school for more than two months when she
had the whooping cough. It was scary when she couldn’t breathe. My
grandmother’s sister had died as a baby of whooping cough. After Marion
got better, my father drove my sisters and me to the bus stop every morn-
ing and waited with us until the bus came. This usually wasn’t long. More
often than not it had already gone by, and we would chase it down the
wide Escalén road in our US AID jeep, pass it, jump out at the next stop
just as the bus came swooping to a hale.

One day we rode the bus home from school in a hard rain. Along the
way people stopped the bus to tell the driver that a mud bank had just slid
down on top of a row of shanty houses, killing everyone inside. I don’t
remember why they stopped the bus and told the driver this. I remember
the rain kept falling against the windows and the windshield wipers
squeaked across the glass. The day was cold.

Another memory: in an El Salvador graveyard, I saw the feet of a dead
person sticking out from under a sheet. The person was lying face up on
a cement platform inside a little building. I looked hard at the dead feet.
My father said the person would be buried that way-wrapped in the sheet
and put in the ground.

Our second Christmas in El Salvador, my grandmother, still adjusting
to widowhood, came to visit for a month. Three years before—just after
Christmas-in the back of an ambulance traversing Thistle Canyon in a
snowstorm, my grandfather died. On this Christmas, my grandmother lay
with my family on our terraced back lawn and looked up at the stars.

We took her to Guatemala to visit Lake Atitlan, riding in a small mo-
torboat across blue and spangled water. Marion was teasing again, and I
sulked angrily at the back of the boat the whole way over. On the opposite
shore, children decked out in dirt and bright clothing shouted, “Saca ma

puch! Saca ma puch!” —an alphabet soup of English and Spanish that

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Plantains

meant Take my picture. We paid them a few coins in return for their faces.
Most Indians won’t let tourists take them home on film because their

souls are forced, unwillingly, to go along.

There are virtually no indigenous peoples in El Salvador; after govern-
ment troops massacred 30,000 Indians in 1932 to quell unrest on the
coffee plantations, they knew they weren’t welcome. In Guatemala the
Indians pit the colors on their looms against a gray fate. Their bright,
patterned clothing brings joy wherever they trudge weighed with babies,
wood, and water, their faces sagging under the burden of existence.

On the shore of Lake Atitlan, I feared for my grandmother’s life. In the
middle of the night, I heard her gasping for breath in the bed across the
room. I crept to her side in the darkness. “Grandma!” I whispered. “Are
you all right?” She awoke and began to laugh and is still laughing when-
ever she tells someone how her snoring was so loud that night, I thought
she was dying.

My grandmother is a laughing person, and she laughed a lot in El Sal-
vador that Christmas season. She laughed when Gloria tried to teach her
a few words in Spanish, and when my mother told her how the lizard
danced with my brother on the back porch. She laughed when a visiting:
general authority at church, caught off guard when she spoke to him in
English, said he thought she was a “white-haired native woman.” She
laughed when I told her about a woman with couches like cumulonimbus
clouds (I'd learned the term in school), which were permanently occupied
by porcelain and pottery vases—in case of earthquake.

I remember most vividly that my grandmother cried when we learned
that the prophet Harold B. Lee had died. I think the missionaries told us.
“But he was so young,” my grandmother said over and over. “He wasn't
supposed to die so young.” I wondered how a man with white hair could
be young, and how she was sad for someone she’d never met.

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Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

Eleven years afterwards I was a missionary in Chile when | learned that
the prophet Spencer W. Kimball had died. I stood in a doorway in Valdi-

via, and wept.

The archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, died more in the man-
ner of Joseph Smith—violently-shot through the heart as he celebrated
mass in the cathedral downtown. This was five years after we left the
country, in March of 1980. The day before, he had given a radio address
in which he protested the daily murders of campesinos. He named their
names and gave the number of their dead. “Brothers,” he said to the Na-
tional Guard, the police, and the military, “you come from our own peo-
ple. You are killing your brothers.” Romero’s own murder was the lighted
match that ignited full-fledged civil war. By the end of that year, 10,000
civilians had died at the hands of government forces, and within three
years the number had reached 1932 proportions: 30,000. In the name of
fighting Communism, the U.S. government undertook the economic and
military support of Manuel Duarte’s regime, which Amnesty Interna-
tional accused of some of the worst human rights abuses ever recorded.

Our peaceful neighborhood of Escalén was itself the site of more than
one bloody assassination, probably carried out by members of the FMLN.
We heard about the killings on TV in Colorado, and it all seemed so
unbelievable, so far away.

When we left in 1975, the civil war was still years in the future, al-
though the FALANGE-the first government-backed death squads—were
already operating. My father, who went into the countryside to look at
farm plots and touch the soil with his fingers, told us that the campesinos
were terrified of anyone in uniform. Some wouldn't talk even to him.
Others generously offered him juice or sugar water (which, if he gave in
to thirst and accepted, resulted in severe stomach cramps and diarrhea).

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Plantains

My parents and grandmother had a scare one afternoon when. they
drove to the foot of the volcano Bocarén. On the way back, a group of
soldiers loaded down with machine guns and cartridges, flagged down the
car and demanded a ride. They did not ask. It was not a request. They
squeezed into the back, guns clanking and weaving, then rode in obdu-

rate silence into town, gun barrels pointed at the back of my parents’
heads.

Gloria fried plantains for breakfast every morning, rinsed lettuce leaves
in a Clorox solution, and made bread from whole wheat flour the way my
mother taught her. (She never ate the bread herself; she liked corn tortil-
las and beans.) Every Sunday night I feasted on her bread crumbled in
milk with spoonfuls of jam. We got used to the daily luxury of that bread.
Not like now, when homemade bread calls for a binge with honey and
butter.

Gloria taught Christopher to speak Spanish. From his high chair he’d
scream at her angrily, the blue vein on the side of his neck blossoming
outwards, “Vaya!” —Get out of here. Gloria laughed at his anger, the cres-
cent of gold on her front tooth glinting. Once she brought her three-year-
old daughter to visit. We have a snapshot of a solemn little girl dressed in
pink lace sitting on the piano bench, one side of her paralyzed. Gloria
lived with us all week and saw her girl only on Sundays. When she te-
turned from her day off, she brought the pungent odor of poverty into our
house. I don’t know who took care of the child while Gloria was working.

Eight or nine years after we returned to Colorado, Gloria called from
Texas. She had escaped from the war zone in El Salvador with her daugh-
ter and was living in the U.S. illegally with a relative or a friend. My
mother couldn’t make out most of what Gloria said, having forgotten
most of her Spanish, but she wondered if Gloria might not show up one

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Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

day on our doorstep and ask for asylum. We waited for her, but she never

came.

The church we attended was in a middle class neighborhood of San
Salvador. “Middle Class” meant you had at least a tin roof over your head,
which was also the unspoken prerequisite for being taught the gospel. We
went home one Sunday with a friend from church who served us cookies
in.a dark, empty room with paint peeling off the cement walls. Consider-
ing our own airy and marbled landings, it is amazing that the ward mem-
bers took us in with such abandon and affection: Their hearts were truly
great.

They especially loved my brother, that plump, blue-eyed toddler. Eve-
rywhere he went, an admiring crowd followed. His special friend was At-
mando, the Central American heavyweight wrestling champion.
Christopher spent part of every Sacrament meeting wriggling in Ar-
mando’s tremendous arms.

The ward members also loved my mother, who brought them The Mu-
sic every Sunday. Before we arrived, the miniature organ that stood at the
front of the chapel had been silent for many years, with maybe a mission-
ary or two stumbling out some hymns from time to time. But my mother
could play “Secret Prayer” with precision and fervor, and the congrega-
tion belted it out with gusto. When she played Bach or Haydn as
postlude, most of the congregation stayed in their seats until it was over.
Afterwards, small, crooked women hugged my mother in gratitude, tears
rolling from their eyes.

The ward members knew how to have a good time. If there was a youth
dance, everybody went. The old folks sat along the walls, the babies
crawled around the floor, and the young people danced. Ifit was sunshiny
after church, everyone stopped at the ice cream cart parked outside the
gate and bought cones before heading home. If it was raining, everyone

Wasatch Review International / 70

Plantains

laughed and talked in the hallways: They had a good time when they were
together, but felt no particular obligation to come to church when they
didn’t feel like it, or-which was more likely the case-when they didn’t
have the heart for it, or spare coins for bus fare.

At first I didn’t understand anything the members said. As they bore
teary, unintelligible testimonies at the pulpit, I fiddled with the soft spots
on the bench where termites were devouring the wood. Then one day, I
realized I was listening. I realized 1 understood.

After church meetings, I dashed with the other children round and
round the church building, hid behind the giant poinsettia bushes, in-
spected the chickens that the caretaker kept out back. The church build-
ing was surrounded by.a high, iron-barred fence lined by a few thin fir
trees that provided spotty shade along one side. Under those trees the
earth smell was as loamy and deep as the passion I carried inside my chest.
I longed to graduate from Primary so I could be nearer the object of my
affections, who had advanced to Mutual. By the time I did, he had already
left the ward. i

My father was the scout master. At first he’d been the young men’s
president, but he told the bishop, after several weeks when no teachers
showed up, (my father has told this story many times), “Make me scout
master so at least I'll have something prepared.”

It’s not that the members weren’t committed. I understood the depth
of their faith even before I could understand their impassioned words in
testimony meeting. It’s just that in a country where termites eat the
benches out from under you, and you can hear their machinations during
sacrament prayers and you go home with a rash on your shoulders and
thighs; in a country where it either rains every night or doesn't rain at all
for months; in a country where fear of death is not a distant dream but a
way of life; where every other tree has been burned in behalf of a corn

Wasatch Review International / 71

Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

tortilla while plantations of coffee trees flourish inside barbed wire fences;
and where rich people keep vases on sofa cushions in case of earthquake
while poor people get wrapped in a sheet and stuck in the ground, each
exertion must be weighed carefully against its counterforce.

My father has never been capable of meting out his exertions with care.
He overwhelmed the scouts with exertions on their behalf. These were
boys who had learned to expect nothing—who lived a few miles from the
beach, but had never seen the sea, who lived in the shadow of a volcano,
but had never set foot on its slopes. When my father planned a hike to
that volcano, Bocarén, only two scouts showed up to take part. Their
report of the day’s adventures stunned those who'd stayed home, who
never dreamed the excursion would really happen. Compassionate, my
father planned another trip. This, time the doubting Thomases, too,
showed up at 6:30 a.m., ready to climb. i

I went along on the second trip. The trail to the top was busy with men
carrying wood on their shoulders in a way that kept their heads twisted
down and to one side, and with women, erect as always under the loads
on their heads. We were there for adventure, but most of the others on
the path were on missions for cornmeal, wood, or water. Missions of life.

The scouts’ shoulders and thighs worked jubilantly as they climbed the
slope of the volcano they’d looked at every day of their lives. They were
happy. I remember their easy jubilance. I see them in my mind as they
climb. Tonight as I cook plantains for dinner, I wonder what they are
doing now. How many of them died in the fighting.

There are only two seasons in El Salvador: the wet and the dry. In the
rainy season, mud banks collapsed atop the roofs of cardboard shacks and
killed people. The bougainvillea and fuchsia glowed a brilliant sunrise
during daylight hours, and the hills, the grass, the volcano glowed green.
In the rainy season lightning struck the roof of our house with a terrifying

Wasatch Review International / 72

“blam!” and the school bus’s windshield wipers squeaked all the way to
and from school. In the dry season, cows and dogs along the side of the
road turned into leather bird cages on legs; Blind Tilio couldn’t keep the
grass in our yard from turning yellow; and dust smoked up from the
women’s stately, burdened march down our street. In the dry season we
couldn’t lend the tap handle to the children who came to the house be-
cause our cistern was nearly empty. We climbed down inside the tank and
passed up buckets of filmy water that we used to flush the toilets. We had
bottled water to drink, but I don’t know what the children from the gully
did when we turned them away from our door.

Stephanie was baptized at the beginning of a dry season. My father
lifted her dripping and pure from the font of baptism water. Her hair was
still wet and her body cool when I hugged her afterwards. “Just think,
right now you have no sins!” I said. This was very real to me. I didn’t want
her to do anything bad, nothing to mar that purity, ever. When we fought
later that evening, I felt guilty and sad.

As | fry plantains tonight and my apartment takes on the aroma of
childhood ending, as my own small children chuckle over green. play-
dough at the kitchen table and a spring breeze jiggles the plants in the
window, a National Public Radio report on: El Salvador comes over the
air. The report says declassified documents show the U.S. government
knew all along that the regime it stockpiled with weapons was murdering
its own people. Nobody wanted to know, so they pretended not to. When
a U.S. journalist reported a mass execution in the rural area of El Mazote,
The Wall Street Journal accused him of making it up.

I can scarcely bear to listen. A coward, I reach through the steam of
plantains turning gold in my frying pan and turn off the news. The last
thing I hear is this: they’ve found the bones in El Mazote. Hundreds of
them.

Wasatch Review International / 73

Lisa Madsen de Rubilar

[’ve never returned to El Salvador, but peace, I hear, is returning at last.
A treaty has been signed, elections have been held, and a new govern-
ment has been formed. Yet I read in the papers that thugs are still killing
people—a woman as she nurses her child in a bedroom, a man as he pulls
up to a red light on his way to work. The killing may not end as long as a
handful of people live in fear and opulence behind spiked iron fences, a
few more live between flaking walls and tin roofs, and even more erect
cardboard over their heads that disintegrates when it rains.

Now the Wall Street Journal is printing editorials that say poverty was
at the root of the wat; that while the East Asians were combating the
Communist threat by feeding and educating the poor, the Latin Ameri-
cans were busy killing anyone who said he was hungry.

I was not there for the bloodshed, but I know about the hunger. I was
witness to the poverty. I sat in its cardbdard house and breathed its dust.
I saw its wide, dry feet; its tight, mysterious belly. And that has changed
forever who I am.

Sometimes the glint of Gloria’s tooth as she laughed filled the whole
house with light. The other maids who came and went were simply maids,
but Gloria was Gloria. I loved her. One of the others, named Laura, rarely
spoke, and moved among our things with a sour expression on her face.
“She is smart,” my mother said, “and that is why she is angry.” My mother
understood, but in the end she had to fire Laura, whose rage was over-
flowing the house. After she left, Gloria’s sister came to work for awhile,
but her slack-jawed slowness drove everyone to distraction. At last, only
Gloria remained.

L wish I'd asked Gloria where her daughter stayed during the week, and
whether her child needed a chicken to eat. I wish I'd asked her if she really

Wasatch Review International / 74

- Plantains

liked tortillas and beans better than bread and milk and jam. I wish I’d
told her she didn’t need to eat in the kitchen.

I never did. But Gloria loved me anyway. One day she patted me affec-
tionately on the rear end, in the exact spot where I'd had a gamma globu-
lin shot, and we both laughed afterwards about the great leap I took
toward the ceiling. She was often the silent, approving audience of my
dance around the furniture to the music of Swan Lake. Yet I don’t remem-
ber saying good-bye to her. When the boy I loved left El Salvador, I stood
on the staircase staring at a closing door, telling myself “Never again.
Never. Never. Never. Never.” Surely I must have cried to leave Gloria, but
I can’t remember a thing.

Not long ago I found her name in my mother’s address book, above two
out-dated addresses X-ed over in pencil and ink. Gloria Tomasa Cafias.
Seeing it there on my way to an aunt’s or a cousin’s name made her seem,
suddenly, very near. I almost spoke her name aloud.

Gloria. If you were standing beside me at this moment, you would tell
me how to make these plantains as soft and sweet as yours. You would tell
me how to fix yams so the marshmallows puff brown and round on top;
how to pat corn tortillas into a perfect circle; make yeast and flour bloom
into perfect bread. And I could say thank you for loving me. For watching
me dance. For forgiving perfectly that I was rich and you were poor. For

letting me read the scriptures to you as you ate tortillas and beans. For
believing, after all.

Wasatch Review International / 75

Review at Eight a

One by one the children
come retracing steps as if
down banks of tamarisk

Chapel halls become

to timeless Jordan's edge.
strait path and narrow

Here once, in howling wilderness
of heart and mind, the Wholly Clean
in common water lay

way that calls to follow—
you, once-washed,
forgetful, errant and lost, :

find leansing course for ever-rising streams
to refind your cle

here before the font that flow again to bear

the stains this journey grinds

into our days.

Wasatch Review International / 76 Wasatch Review International / 77

it

Witness here a cleansing

of the lambs,

spring white and waiting

for the world;

an arming of the guileless;
opening of eyes.

And sense again, fetid lives
enfolded here among the meek
who know no sin,

a gentle washing

of your innocence.

Wasatch Review International / 78

IV

You will remember

the quick descent,
rush of water,
hard-caught breath.
From a maze of private
compromise, of quiet
failure, tainted truths,
you will remember descent
and rush,

arms that held
through freshet surge,
that lay you down

and called you back,

water-washed and new.

Wasatch Review International / 79

SRS

R
R

i
:

V

This arm squared

sharp above the font

finds pattern in a rite

of arms:

high before Moriah’s stone;
holy horn above young David’s
head; twisted sinews stretched
across the Healer’s Staff. . .
call acceptance

on sacrifice proffered

in water or in blood.

Wasatch Review International / 80

“Vi

Swept today

in the albine strength

that lays these children

in ritual dark, back

and down beneath liquid
folds of an ancient grave,
then draws out, secure again,
water-slick and gasping

like a new-born into light—
feel the Father’s arms

that in a mystery of love
softly lower into death,

and then triumphant, lift again,
morning-slick and gasping

into life anew.

Wasatch Review International / 81

Vil

There is a fountain
of pure water in borders

of the wilderness

VIN

This patient cup He brings you,
sweet upon the lips
(how still the river,

where dawn breaks urgent how wide the wounds!)

over surface of a simple pool— invites to holy suppers,

across brain’s right hemisphere, calls again to hidden

baroque wordmaps, unsounded depths— Rintsanthin:

where far from errors E. Leon Chidester
of Yours and Mine

we speak a Name,
and lift burdens so

sorrows will fall light.* E. Leon Chidester is from Cedar City, Utah, where he teaches Spanish at Southern

Utah University. In addition to teaching, he enjoys writing, gardening, and spend-
ing time with his family. He has previously published in several other journals.

*Mosiah 18:30

Wasatch Review International / 82 Wasatch Review International / 83

Marilyn Brown

From the novel Road to Covered Bridge

by
Marilyn Brown

Synopsis of the novel Road to Covered Bridge: Early is morning, on
ten hours before eleven-year-old Lindy Callister s family me a es
new home in Utah, the owner of the Sinclair next door to their new
finds his wife face down in his irrigation culvert. | .

For Lindy it is the beginning of a new kind of consciousness: S -
neral; the babysitter, Nancy, who locks Lindy in an outhouse to es sce
her “oracle,” which predicts only disasters; and her Ae wi oe
half-Indian America Laughingheart, who heals with herbs, but nee
resolve the mystery of Emily Potter’s disappearance from her abe

ter’s retarded boy Laman is one suspect for the murder, even t sce
does not accept his mother’s death, but rather looks for her on i ee
garty porch in the form of a bird. For lack of evidence, however, the
der remains unresolved. |

As the disasters continue—Grandmother Callister is Le an
ploding case of beans and Lindy falls out ofa tree—the i : — ie
family is Grandmother Callister’s death. It is Lindy . at ra
railing against the grave robbers and taking his wife’s body ae sien
“place of unrest,” ultimately outlines the final answers to ; e my:
that all of them knew but were unwilling to make into words.

In this chapter, Lindy escapes the chaos of her home, seeking peace
outside, only to find that the world is not a peaceful place.

Wasatch Review International / 84

The House Away From Home

Marilyn Brown

A THE BEANS IN THE STORE HAD EXPLODED, SNAPPED UB AND
cut my grandmother’s cheek, there seemed to be more than a nec-
essary amount of confusion. I wanted out of the house. But my two little
sisters were crying. My mother would not let me go.

As my grandmother lay on the couch, under the quilt with the trains
on it, looking almost dead, I sat on the peach crate watching. Every breath
she breathed reminded me that I was the one who heard the explosion in
the storage space, and I was the one who found Grandmother sitting on
the floor with beans in her eyes, beans in her hair, beans on the shelves
and the ceiling, and blood dripping on her nylons cut up and snagged all
along the sharp bones of her legs. Although I was only eleven and had
nothing to do with it, my mother wanted me to “watch Grandma,” to
“listen for her breathing.” And now I couldn’t sleep, hearing her breath-
ing hard in the night.

Finally, my mother let the half-Indian, America Laughingheart, come
to help us because she had some herbs that would bring back my grand-
mother’s strength. I was afraid, though, that America might say some-

Marilyn Brown's novel, Road to Covered Bridge, is based on her own childhood in
Provo, Utah. When she received her MFA in 1992, her thesis project at the Uni-
versity of Utah was the first-place winner of the 1991 Utah State Fine Arts Lit-
erature Competition, and the material for a series of regional author outreach
(Tumblewords) readings recently performed in Idaho and Utah. One chapter of
the novel appeared in Aspen’s Book’s Christmas for the World, and another will be
included in the Tumblewords anthology out of New Mexico.

Wasatch Review International / 85

Marilyn Brown

thing like, “How are you, Lindy? Did you tell your mother about our ride
home from school the other day?”

But when she came into the house, she only looked at me and smiled.
“How are you, Lindy?” she said.

My eyes darted to my mother and I didn’t smile back. I had been sick
in the lunchroom, when she had scooped up my vomit into a pudding mix
box and taken me home in her horse cart. I hadn’t told my mother about
it.

“T’m fine,” I said, watching my mother out of the corner of my eye. But
she had not heard me, busy with Grandma Callister, propping a tea cup
to her lips.

America opened up her leather bag. There were little cloth packs of
tea. She took out one tied with a piece of yellow yarn. “Give her this one
twice a day,” she said. “She will heal quickly. It’s skunk cabbage.”

I wondered why she would give my grandmother something for skunks
instead of for human beings.

“T am so sorry this has happened to Grandma Callister,” America said.
“This will help too.” She took out a black powder. “Licorice root,” she
said. “Where is her husband these days? Was that him walking up and
down the road several times a day before it began to snow?”

I thought she was talking to my mother and saying, “Where is your
husband?” I thought she was asking about my father.

“He’s in the war,” I said. “He draws pictures of guns for ships.”

“Grandpa,” Mother said. “She’s asking about Grandpa, Lindy.”

“Oh,” I said. I pulled my lips shut. I did not dangle my legs on the peach
crate. | didn’t look at Grandma anymore. But from under my bangs |
couldn’t keep my eyes off America Laughingheart’s arms. They rolled and
sagged like huge udders on a big cow. I breathed easier when she did not

tattle on me, but she was telling something on Grandpa now.

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The House Away from Home

“Before the snow came, he came by the graveyard and looked down
into the graves they dug there. He was there when they found out Emily
Potter’s body was missing. Did he tell you?”

« : .
Yes, he did,” my mother said. Now the conversation was becoming

even more confusing. “Have they found her?”

“Not yet. They believe someone buried her in Covered Bridge. They
found her ring in a pawn shop, but it was the work of a fence. They
suspect Laman Potter or the Stuart boys. Of course it will be impossible
to find her if she has been buried somewhere in the canyon.”

“ ’ . .
Doesn’t seem it’s even safe to die around here,” my mother said, “let
alone live around here.”

“Do you have any burdock growing in your yard?” America said.
“I don’t know,” my mother said.
What about Laman Potter or the Stuart boys? I wanted to ask, but
didn’t dare.

“You should take a formula I’ve compounded. There isn’t enough sun
in the winter to keep you from feeling low. The children should also take
something to keep them well. When the snows really begin to fall after
Christmas, there is nothing to do but stay inside.”

“I take vitamins,” my mother said.

“It’s not enough,” America said.

I watched my mother go through the teas from the leather bag. As she
was picking through them, she asked a question about every one.

“My husband is coming for Christmas,” Mother said. She was almost
smiling.

I was sure this time she was talking about my father, but I didn’t say
anything.

“Can he stay?” America asked.

Wasatch Review International / 87

Marilyn Brown

“No,” my mother said.

“Tt would be best for all of you to be together. The children will languish
in the heat here. Do you have central heat? Does it come through the
floor here?”

I turned away from America. I was already what she said—languished.
The talk crowded in my ears and slipped around like teeth grinding. |
walked to the window. There was rain outside. I pushed the curtain away
and looked out on the street. A man was driving a wagon across to the
Hageartys.

“?'m going out now,” I told my mother.

“Can't you stay, Lindy?” she said. “Stay with Grandmother while I fix
dinner?”

“Tl sit with her,” America said, looking at me. “The children should
stay outdoors as much as possible in the winter.” | looked at America.
Under the floppy red straw hair, her dark eyes burned with a little pointed
light. She winked at me. As if she had jerked a puppet string attached to
the top of my spine, her smile rattled me up and down. I wanted to throw
my arms around her and kiss her. But I didn’t. I put on my coat and walked
through the door quickly. I did not want Jessie or Sissy to follow me. I felt
like a bird flying.

The rain was coming down in sheets. The sky was so black you could
not see the sun. I ran across the street to avoid the trucks. There was so
much water in the street that it shone like a river.

On the other side I walked swiftly north to the Haggartys. The man
was out of the wagon and pulling something out from under a tarp. He
was pulling and pulling. Finally he pulled so hard that whatever it was
knocked him down. He sat up and rubbed his knees. He took the long

package wrapped in newspaper up to the door. Tag Haggarty answered the
door. Behind him stood his sister Lucinda. She saw me.

Wasatch Review International / 88

The House Away from Home
“Hi, Lindy,” she said.

I waved.
“
Do you want to see our new snakes?” she called out.

| I walked up through the rain in the gutter. Everything was shining
with water. The man walked ahead of me. Lucinda let him in and he
carried the long package into the house.

“We're getting a snake tree,” she said. The man disappeared into the
house. Mrs. Haggarty stood and talked to him at the kitchen door. Then
he disappeared.

“The snakes will eat the birds if we don’t hang them on a tree,” Lucinda
said.

We walked through the same door. It was swinging and I stopped in
front of it when it swung back toward me.

“It’s all right,” Lucinda said. “It’s Laman. He made the tree.”

-Now I saw that Laman, Mr. Potter’s son, was the man in the wagon. He
made his way back to the back room. We trailed him through the kitchen
through the hall at the back to the dark recess of the porch. Mrs. Hap.
garty walked in front of him. Then she held the door so that he could
come through. He dragged the snake tree, scraping the floor. The news-
paper began to tear off and Lucinda bent over to pick up the pieces.

“We also have a monkey tree,” she said. “But just a couple of monkeys.”

I saw the back room for the first time. Outside the east windows that
looked toward the mountain, the rain was pouring over the gutters, spill-
ing down the glass. Inside, the heat made ribbons of steam. All sions the
south and north walls cages stood one on top of another. They were
hooked to the walls, or stacked, or hanging from the ceiling. Hundreds of
birds began to cry out. They were chattering or singing. The sound was
deafening. I thought it would be impolite to put my hands over my ears
Lucinda and Tag were not doing it. They walked in and looked ee

Wasatch Review International / 89

Marilyn Brown

Tag began scooping handfuls of grain out of a sack and letting some of it
fall into the bird dishes hooked on the sides of the cages.

“The monkeys are the noisy ones,” Lucinda said.

I could not tell the monkeys from the birds. Everything in the room
seemed noisy to me. At the far end of the room Laman was setting up the
tree. He pulled the newspaper away from it and reached inside the cage
for the snakes. He pulled the first snake out and wrapped it around his
neck.

“He does that all the time.” Lucinda was watching me. She leaned over
to my ear and shouted into it. “Did you know he was daft?”

I pulled away and looked at her. She was grinning. | thought I was
losing my mind. I heard a lot of screaming behind me and her face looked
like a clown’s. The monkeys were screaming. Then Laman started
screaming.

“One of these snakes has swallowed her,” he was screaming. “One of
these snakes swallowed her.”

Lucinda ran to him and took the snake out of his hands. It looked
long and slick. In the center of its body a large undigested lump rolled and
bumped under its scales. “Hey,” she said. “Leave Theory alone.” She had
the snake in her hands. She strung it out and all of us in the room watched
the pulse of the lump inside the long gullet. “This is Theory,” she said.
“Don't you think she is gorgeous? Lots of times Laman has brought her
mice, haven’t you, Laman? He brings mice because he thinks his mother
is one of these birds. He don’t want the snake to eat any of these birds.”

I looked around the room. There were hundreds of birds, all of them
chattering. Mrs. Haggarty was at the door near the kitchen tightening the
door of one of the cages with a screw driver.

“Theory hasn’t got your mother,” Lucinda said. “Laman, get your
hands off het. This is the mouse you brought her a couple of days ago.”

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The House Away from Home

“When you girls want to come out in the kitchen, I just made a couple
of muffins for you,” Mrs. Haggarty said.

“I want some muffins,” Laman said. “I want some muffins.”

“He don’t have any other place to go,” Lucinda told me. “Do you know
where he lives in Covered Bridge?”

“I saw the house,” I said. It was a small white house hidden up against
the hill on the other side of the covered bridge. I had been there
once—our first day in town—when we went with my mother to pick up
Mr. Potter’s car so she could drive to the funeral. Jessica and I rode in the
back of the truck. We rode past the Stuart house and I saw all the boys in
the yard taking apart an old automobile. I saw their sister Nancy, who
locked me in the outhouse, in the door with her red hair flying in the sun.

We got out and walked around and saw the ditch where Mr. Potter
found his wife Emily’s body with her hair fanning out in the water under
the water beetles. We had seen a strange man peer from behind the barn.

Mr. Potter said it was his son. It was this Laman, all tight. I hadn’t noticed
him much.

I had needed to use Mr. Potter’s bathroom and walked in the quiet
house on the rug with the large roses and saw Mrs. Potter’s picture sitting
up on the dresser in the hall. She was wearing ice skates and smiling.

“Laman was living there until his mother died,” Lucinda said. “Then
he came here the next morning and we let him sleep in here on a piece
of cloth. He believes she is here somewhere.” She waved toward the birds.
“Do you believe spirits stay around after they die?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think they might.”

“There is some spirits can go live with God right away. But Laman
thinks his mother did something no one should speak of. He can’t tell us
what she did. But he says she is still here. We try to let him be comfortable

Wasatch Review International / 91

Marilyn Brown

here with the birds. He feeds them. We feed him and try to take care of
him. But sometimes he disappears for days at a time.”

Tag was pulling one of the bird dishes off one of the cages. The bird
inside the cage popped through suddenly and he lashed out and spilled
the grain out of the bird dish. When the dish fell to the floor, the bird
pumped its wings and flew to the top of the window.

“Get down from there!” Tag screamed. “Get down from there, Lehi.
Get your body off that bar!”

“The bird’s name is Lehi?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “You heard that before?”

“No,” I said, but I lied.

“The rest of these birds are named Nephi, Lemuel, and Sam. There's
Noah and a couple of Almas.”

Llooked around the room. I thought the whole world was coming down
on me, but then Mrs. Haggarty brought in the plate of blueberry muffins.
They were large perplexing things, floury and lumpy with uneven veins
of blueberries folded among crunchies. Lucinda and Tag concentrated on
them as much as I did until their father came home and began rummaging
in the bureau at the back of the bird room. He was telling Mrs. Haggarty
something serious about his work.

“Bob’s camera run out of film. And I think it leaks.”

“Well, I’m not sure the camera’s in that drawer,” Mrs. Haggarty said.

Mr. Haggarty rifled through boxes of bird seed, fat rolls of butcher pa-
per, and old newspapers.

“What you need that camera for?” Lucinda said.

“They found her shoe,” Mr. Haggarty said. He took out some little
pottery bird watering troughs, holding them in both hands. He set them
out on the floor, There was no room on top of the bureau where two bird

Wasatch Review International / 92

The House Away from Home

cages sat with cockatoos looking over Mr. Haggarty’s shoulder. “A white

”

one.

“They found a white shoe?” Lucinda said, her eyes large.

“We can’t dig now. It’s starting to snow.”

“Snowing up there in the canyon, is it?” Mrs. Haggarty asked. “It’s just
raining down here.”

“Well, it’s starting to snow big,” Mr. Haggarty said, still rummaging in
the drawer and not finding anything. “And you know what happens when
it snows big. You can’t find nothing. Nothing looks the same. You need
photographs.”

While he was taking things out of the drawers, the birds were scream-
ing. The monkeys had climbed out on Tag’s shoulders and they were
walking back and forth across the back of his neck. He sat down on the
floor and let the monkeys walk all over his ears and his hair. Something
rattled outside against the window and I thought it was the snow. The
steam was so thick on the windows you couldn't see anything.

“T thought that camera was in this drawer,” Mr. Haggarty said.

Somebody knocked on the window, and Mrs. Haggarty looked up. “My
goodness, who could that be?” she said, her hands still holding the plate
where a couple of huge muffins still sat. She walked over to the north
window. You couldn’t see anyone. There was only a shadow outside the
steam.

“Go around, Tag,” Mr. Haggarty said.
“No, never mind. I think I know who that is,” Mrs. Haggarty said.

Lucinda walked to the window and rubbed it with her hand. She made
a big watery spot. “It’s Nancy,” she said.

“Why did you go over there?” Mrs. Haggarty said. “She saw you.”

“Never mind. Go around, Tag,” Mr. Haggarty said. “See what she
wants.

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Nancy was knocking on the glass.

“She has somebody with her,” Lucinda said. “A baby.”

I looked up. “What kind of baby?” I said.

“Looks like a little girl.”

I walked to the window and looked out. Nancy had Sissy.

By now Tag was at the kitchen window. He refused to go around like
his father said. He had opened the window and let the cold rain through.
He was leaning up on the sink with the monkeys still in his hair and
screaming out the crack in the open window.

“What do you want?” Tag was calling out.

By now I was right behind Tag. “She has my sister,” I said.

“What are you doing with Lindy’s sister?” Tag yelled.

IT couldn’t heat what Nancy said.

“I better go out there,” | said.

“Stay here,” Mrs. Haggarty said. “She can’t mean much good.”

“She says your sister was trying to Cross the street and nearly got run
over by a big truck,” Tag said.

“It’s really raining out there,” I said. “I better go now.”

“Suit yourself,” Mrs. Haggarty said.

“Why is that bird out?” Mr. Haggarty was saying.

“Don’t let anybody hurt that bird,” Laman was crying.

“T wish somebody wouldn’t move my camera,” Mr. Haggarty was say-
ing.

I slipped out of the door and around to the north side of the house
where Nancy was standing by the kitchen window. I looked up and could
still see Tag and the monkeys hidden behind the steamy glass.

Nancy was standing there in the rain holding Sissy’s hand. Her wet hair

streaked down her face. “You want your sister or not?” she said.

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ives ! ” . “ .
Sissy!” I said. “What did you do? You came across the street alone!”

She was coming after you,” Nancy said. “She about got killed. A pie
truck came down on her.”

I kneeled down and held Sissy in my arms. She was trembling. It was
getting colder. The wind was blowing the rain again. She didn’t have any
sweater on. Her diaper was soggy.

I looked at Nancy, Nancy looked at me.

“Did they tell you about the white shoe?” Nancy asked me.
I nodded.

“Well, did they tell you I was the one who found the shoe?”

I stared at Nancy. She was tall, and stood leaning her head back, which
made her even taller.

“Oh,” I said, shivering. The day we heard Rigby’s voice in the barn, the
moments we spent on the cemetery fence while Mrs. Potter’s coffin oe on
the side of her grave, every terrible move Nancy made toward whoever it
was digging in the graveyard at midnight came back to me, and I backed
away from her, even without thinking.

Now I was reminded how her voice sounded when she locked us in the
outhouse the first day.

“
So where are you going?” Nancy said.

I don’t know,” I said. I took Sissy’s hand. “Home. I’m going home, I
guess.”

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ne
wml cena sr ne aamrmmnnay

First Snow

For the old and lonely
let it be the homecoming
of souls they’ve loved

and lost

For the children ' Confessions

let it be marigolds—
petals wilting
at the touch of petals

Let the deaf hear it a one-act play

as whisperings of the moon,

the gossip of angels ; by J. Scott Bronson

Make the blind see heaven

in a billion chips of light
Then silence

3
Let the first snow Ft
hush my voice.
Let it touch a finger i for my sister

to my lips. i who suffers still

—Jerry Johnston

Wasatch Review International / 96 :
Wasatch Review International / 97

Vegan aS Saongaaitioreifin magus wie sayin strate

J. Scott Bronson

CHARACTERS

He is a man in his late forties or early fifties. He is not
yet completely comfortable with counseling.

Bishop:

Rebecca: She is a woman in her early or mid-twenties. She be-
lieves herself to be self-reliant. [The actress need not
be—probably should not be—a glamour model type. In
fact, overweight might be a good choice.]

Rex: Rebecca’s older brother. He may appear onstage for his
monologue, or appear in voice only. I would recom-

mend onstage.

SETTING | .

All of the action takes place in the bishop’s office. ee is :
desk—wooden—with typical desk things on it: a blotter, ae oe ae
phone, a pen and pencil set, a lamp, a note pad, ; set of t . ae
standard works (scriptures), and other Mormon noc VJesus t . ie
The Articles of Faith, Approaching Zion, etc.). All of the items on the

irs: ne be-
are impeccably arranged. There are three chairs: a comfortable o

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i
i

Confessions

hind the desk and two wooden ones in front of the desk. No walls, no
doors or windows. “Place” them, but don’t use them, except when noted.
And try to avoid pantomiming. The idea is to have as much dark space
as possible around the tightly lit office space.

(Lights up. The BISHOP is kneeling at his desk, praying. Pause. He stands,
goes to the door, looks out, steps out, steps back in, goes to the front of the desk
and situates the two chairs that are facing each other. He sits in one of the chairs.
He reaches across to the other chair, decides that it is too close and slides it away
a couple of inches. He stands and goes to the door again to have a look around
out in the hall. He steps in, looks at his watch and sits in the other chair in front
of the desk. He checks the distance again.)

BISHOP: So, Sister Wells—No. Uh... (Pause. He switches chairs.)
Well, Sister Wells—Shit. (He stands and goes to the window, looks out,
comes back to the desk and starts arranging things that are already perfectly

arranged. He sits in the comfortable ‘chair behind the desk and looks at his
watch. REBECCA enters.)

REBECCA: Hi, Bishop.

BISHOP: Hi. What are you doing here? (He rises and goes to the door
and looks out.)

REBECCA: Uh... I, uh—

BISHOP: I have another appointment—if she ever shows up—
What’s up?

REBECCA: Well, I... I came to talk to you.

BISHOP: Well, as soon as I finish this appointment I’m going right

home. Why don’t you go keep your mother company ‘til I get there. She’ll
probably feed you too.

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J. Scott Bronson

REBECCA: Dad, I really— I-—Ire—I uh... need to talk to you.

(Pause.)
BISHOP: I have an appointment scheduled, I can't talk right now.

REBECCA: I know.
BISHOP: I don’t think I’ll be very long.

(Pause.) -
Your mom, I’m sure, would love for you to stop by and visit.

(Pause.) 7
After I get home and finish my dinner, Tl go out in the den with you

and we can talk.
REBECCA: No... That’s all right.
BISHOP: Becky—
REBECCA Dad—
BISHOP: Rebecca, Rebecca. I know. I’m sorry.

(Pause.)
Will you wait for me?

REBECCA: Uh...mm. No.

BISHOP: Why?

REBECCA: Dad... I’m your appointment.

BISHOP: What? No, my appointment is with a new move-in. Uh, ..
.a Carrie Wells.

REBECCA: I know. That’s me.

BISHOP: I don’t— Why?

REBECCA: I, uh—

BISHOP: What’s wrong?

REBECCA: Noth—

BISHOP: Is your car all right?

REBECCA: Ye—

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Confessions

BISHOP: It’s not acting up again, is it?

REBECCA: N—

BISHOP: I’m tired of fixing that thing.

REBECCA: There’s—

BISHOP: One more thing goes wrong on that car and I’m junkin’ it.
(Pause.)

REBECCA: The car is fine.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: Why did you make an appointment with a fake name?

REBECCA: | just—I didn’t— I didn’t want you to know it was me.

BISHOP: What do you mean?

REBECCA: I told Brother Heckman that my name was Kathy Wells
and that I was going to be moving into the ward, and I wanted to talk to
the bishop about a few things.

BISHOP: I know all that. Except for getting the first name wrong
that’s just about exactly what the note says that Brother Heckman gave
me. But—

REBECCA: You have him well-trained then. He’s almost perfect.

BISHOP (Glaring:) Why Beck—Rebecca? Why go to all this trouble?
(Pause.)

REBECCA: Because J need to talk to you.

BISHOP: I’m not that hard to find. I’m home almost all the

time—you know that. You spend almost as much time at our house as you
do at your apartment.

REBECCA: I know.
(Pause.)
BISHOP: So you didn’t need— What is it you nee—? If you need to

confess something, I’m not the one you should talk to. You should talk to
your own bishop.

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REBECCA: Dad—
BISHOP: That doesn’t mean I won't talk to you about it, but if it is
something serious like that, Pll counsel you to go to your bishop.
REBECCA: It’s nothing like that, Dad. Not quite.
(Pause.)
BISHOP: Why did you go to all this trouble?
REBECCA: | didn’t want to chicken out.

BISHOP: What?

REBECCA: I was afraid that... if | knew that you knew it was
me—that was coming—your appointment, I might—I don’t know. You'd
cancel and say let’s talk at home and I didn’t want to talk to you there. I
can’t, [can’t... uh... T have to talk to you here. It has to be here.
(Pause.)

All right?

BISHOP: Sure.

(Pause.)
Sit down. (She sits in one of the chairs in front of the desk. He is standing

behind the other. He hesitates a moment then pulls the other chair back against
the “wall” (out of the way), then sits behind the desk. Pause.) So, uh. . . what's
up?

REBECCA (Sigh:) Mom says you're really getting into this bishop
thing.

BISHOP: How do you mean?

REBECCA: | don’t know. That— that you, you're really getting into
it. You like it.

BISHOP: Oh yeah, it’s great. Today the Relief Society President told
me that there’s a little group of ladies in the ward who have decided that
Y’m a hypocrite and a liar, and she pretty much agreed with them.

(Pause.)

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Confessions

REBECCA: What did you tell her?

BISHOP: O i
Pine h, you know. Something understanding.

Well... so.
REBECCA: So.

BISHOP: So, what’s up?
(Pause.)

REBECCA: Okay. (Pause. He is letting her bring this out on her own.)

This is not a confessio
} nm... really. I mean, it is in it’

nothing I—I didn’t do anything wrong. pena
(Pause.)

This is something I

g I have to tell you, but I couldn’
; t tell you—can’

you as— ... a daddy-daughter thing. It... uh : id
(Pause.) ~

It’s ea— i i
ee I thought it would be easier in a sort of .. . counselor, uh
uh, patient, uh— No. a

(Pause.)
en cnik already told my bishop, and my— uh, a therapist, and
uh. : it’s time— They both say that, uh, it’s— uh... that] should cell
you, but— I thought it would— Be easier. . . maybe . . . I can’t tell.

can’t tell my dad... but... I c—I '
I’m making sense. c—Ican tell another bishop. I don’t think

(Pause.)

BISHOP: Tell me what?

(Long pause.)

REBECCA: I was molested. When I was—

I was molested.
(Pause.)
BISHOP: By whom?

-.. young—lI was young.

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REBECCA: By Grampa.
BISHOP: My dad?
REBECCA: Ub-huh.
(Pause.)
BISHOP: Oh, that poor man.
REBECCA: Oh God.
BISHOP: What? (He may stand at this point, but he will not yet leave the
shelter of his desk.)
What do y— uh. What do you wan—-what do you nee—what do you
want me to do?
(Pause.)
REBECCA: Nothing.
BISHOP: Becky— I’m sorry. I’m, uh..
wh— ... what you need.
REBECCA: I need you to feel sorry for me.
(Pause.)
BISHOP: Yeah.

REBECCA: Yeah.
(Light change. Focus on REBECCA. REBECCA turns away from the
years old. Throughout this scene her clasped hands, or

_Ldon’t— I wish I knew...

desk. She is now eight
arms are unconsciously shielding her crotch.)

BISHOP (In darkness:) Becky! Becky, Honey! Where are you? (She
appears not to have heard.)

Becky! C’mon, it’s time to go! (Pause. As he enters the light:)
Becky— What are you doing, Hon? Huh?
REBECCA: Nuthin’.
BISHOP: Well, we're going now, come on.

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Confessions

(Pause.)

Come on.

REBECCA: Hub-uh.

BISHOP: What do you mean, huh-uh?
REBECCA: I don’t wanna go. ,
BISHOP: Why not? .

REBECCA: ‘Cause.

BISHOP: ‘Cause why?

REBECCA: ‘Cause.

BISHOP: Becky, everybody else is in the car. They’re waiting. Let’s go.
REBECCA: No.

BISHOP: Becky—

REBECCA: No!

BISHOP: Rebecca Anne, I am not going to take this kind of talk from
you. Now—

REBECCA: I’m not going! ~
BISHOP: You littl—.
(Pause.)

| Becky, Grampa’s gonna take you and Rex to A and W for dinner to-
night. I think he'll even let you get a Mama Burger instead of a Baby
Burger. How does that sound?

(Pause.)

I bet you he might even make you a Wingding for dessert. Wouldn’t
you like that?

REBECCA: No.
BISHOP: Sure you would.
REBECCA: Rex likes Wingdings. I don’t.

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BISHOP: What do you like?
(Pause.)
Huh? What would you like?
(Silence.)
Becky, you can’
and Gramma’s tonight.

REBECCA: Why?
BISHOP: Your mother and I are going to the temple in the morning.

tdo this. You need to spend the night over at Grampa’s

REBECCA: So?
BISHOP: We're leaving early, very early—
REBECCA: So?
BISHOP: And it'll be easier for us to leave straight for the temple
without having to take you to Grampa’s and Gramma’s first.
REBECCA: I can get up early.

BISHOP: I know you can. But there’s no reason we should wake up

Grampa and Gramma so early. Now, come on, let’s go. I told Grampa we'd

have you there by six o'clock and we're already late.
REBECCA: No.
BISHOP (Grabbing her arm and attempting to drag her out of the chair:)
I’m not going through this any more with you—we're going.
REBECCA (Screaming:) No! I won't go! I won't go! I won't go!
(The BISHOP spins her around and spanks her with one serious swat. She
breaks away and runs to a corner of the light and faces her father. He follows
and puts his face and a finger in her face.)

BISHOP: I’m not putting up with this any more, young la
this way. Now you get your butt out in that

dy! There is
no reason for you to be acting

car or I'll give you the blistering of your life! Go! Now!
(She refuses to move. He reaches for her but she pulls away, screaming:)

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Confessions

R : : |
a ae me Don’t touch me! Please don’t touch me! Don’t make
on’t make ! ‘ :
oo me go! I can’t go! Please don’t make me go. Please,
(The BISHOP is stunned. Pause.)
BISHOP: Becky, Honey, what—?
(Pause.)
What's wrong? What's all this about?
REBECCA: Huh?
BISHOP: What are you so upset about, Sweetie?
REBECCA: I—I don’t know.
(Pause.)
BISHOP: Becky, don’t li
aaa you like Grampa and Gramma any more?
Huh?
REBECCA: Yeah. I like ‘em.
BISHOP: Then what’s the problem? I don’t understand
(Pause.) |
You've never done this before, Becky. Why now?
(Pause.) |
Why?
REBECCA: I don’t know.
BISHOP: It’s got to be something. What is it? Tell me
(Pause.)
REBECCA: It’s... it’s... it’ i
: -+-itS... it's... it’s always dark th
BISHOP: What do you mean? =
REBECCA: I mean, it’s dark.
BISHOP: They have a lamp, Sweetie.

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J. Scott Bronson

REBECCA: But it shines up.

BISHOP: I know, Hon. It makes it easier to see the TV, that’s all.

REBECCA: It makes it dark. I don’t like it.

BISHOP (Sighs. Pause.) Listen, Sweetie. Mommy and I are going to
the temple in the morning and it’s a long drive. We haven't been for a
long time and we may not get a chance for another long time. We need
to go. And we need to leave early. Now, I’m sorry we made these arrange-
ments without consulting you first but I didn’t think I had to. Will you
help us out? It means a lot to your mommy and me.

(Pause.)
Maybe next time we can make different arrangements, but it’s too late
for that this time. Will you go?
(Pause.)
Please? For Daddy? Everything’ll be all right. 1 promise.
(Pause.)
REBECCA (Almost in tears:) Uh-huh.
BISHOP: That's a girl. Now let’s get in the car.
REBECCA: Okay.
BISHOP: You kids’ll have a good time. You'll see.
(Pause.)
REBECCA: Okay.
BISHOP: Okay. Come on.
REBECCA: Coming.

(Light change. The BISHOP is seated. REBECCA may stand or sit. Pause.

The BISHOP has pulled in a little.)
BISHOP: Uh...
(Pause.)
Why...?

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a
|
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3

3

soa aes te eas

Confessions

REBECCA: I don’t know why. If he was still alive I guess we could ask
him—.

BISHOP: That’s not what I was... not what I meant.

REBECCA: What did you mean? Huh?

(Pause.)

Why did I let him?

BISHOP: No. No. I wasn’t going to say that either. I’m sure there was

probably nothing you could do about it. . . nothing.

REBECCA: Probably? Dad, what do you think? I had options? I was

eight years old.

BISHOP: My God.
REBECCA: I had just become responsible for my own actions. I

mean, I know it wasn’t my fault that anything happened, and I sort of
knew it then, but not really. He—.

BISHOP: Did he tell you it was your fault?

REBECCA: | don’t want to talk about him.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: This is about him, isn’t it?

REBECCA: No. It’s about me.

BISHOP: Yes, it’s about you, but it’s about him too.

(Pause.)

And it’s about me. And your mother.

REBECCA: Mom has nothing to do with this—

BISHOP: I’m sure she'll want to know. She’ll want to help. She—
REBECCA: She knows. And you're right. But it’s not about her. She

knows that too.

BISHOP: Becky, we’re a family.

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REBECCA: Bullshit!

BISHOP: What do you mean, bullshit? We're a family, a good family.
We stick together. We always stick together. We’ve had problems before,
some of ‘em big, but we’ve never fallen apart. We may not all live together
any more, but we’re still a family.

REBECCA: I know we’re a—jeez, listen to you, you sound like a—

BISHOP: Like a what? .

REBECCA: Like a soap opera— Dad, I know we're a family, that’s not
what I’m— What I’m saying is, so what? So what if we're a family? How
does that—? How is that supposed to help?

BISHOP: The same way it’s always helped—

REBECCA: How’s that? How does the fact that I have parents and
siblings help me?

BISHOP: Well... w— we love each other. -

REBECCA: So?

BISHOP: So... we love each other.

REBECCA: So what? That’s not go—that doesn’t mak—it’s not—it
doesn’t—it . .. Never mind.

BISHOP: Never mind? Never mind? What the hell is this? You come
in here to tell me that my own father molested my daughter, but there’s
nothing I can do to help and then just walk out?

REBECCA: I knew you wouldn’t get this.

BISHOP: Get what? What am I supposed to be getting?

REBECCA: Nothing.

BISHOP: Right.

REBECCA: I’m sorry I came.

BISHOP: Wait. Wait. Beck—Rebecca, wait.

(Pause.)

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. se S ideas si chogus nk peg eins cede edad ane
‘eed aieid sate AS iat Rata AD GNUcash ilsitk Awad Reema aa ids .

BPR ee OC Ae yg Oat ORD Sar cE sPse TU PTAC Otc OT Ean Ce RR RSET cee REV MRCS Fe eee

Confessions

I'm sorry. But just let me explain how it looks . . . from here. From my
point of view. My daughter, whom I see quite frequently at home, who
watches my TV, eats at my table, washes her clothes in my machine, but
rarely ever talks to me, I mean, really talks to me—

REBECCA: I talk to you—

BISHOP: You disagree with me. Let me finish.

(Pause.) :

This daughter, of whom I begrudge none of this, comes in to my office
because she wants to talk to me, but she can’t, but she must, and then
tells me that my father was a pedophile but she refuses to talk about it.

(Pause.)

What is it I’m not getting?

REBECCA: Nothing, Dad. You're right. I shouldn’t have come.

BISHOP: But you did come. Why?

REBECCA: Mom said that we should talk. It sounded— she made it
sound like a good idea.

BISHOP: Well, if your mother suggested it then it is a good idea.

(Pause.)

Did she say exactly what we should talk about?

REBECCA: Forget it, Dad. It’s not a good idea. Not any more.

BISHOP: You know, when your mother and ] finally got ourselves
together enough to go to the temple to get sealed, our bishop gave us
some excellent advice. And it came just in time. He said, “I know you two
have been married five years already, but I’m going to give you the same
advice I give all newlywed couples on their way to the altar.” Then he
looked at me and said, “Ray, I want you to promise me that you will do
everything that Marcia asks you to do, because she will never ask you to
do anything that won’t make you a better person for having done it.” And

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J. Scott Bronson

he was right. I promised him, and I’ve kept my promise. I’ve bitched about
it plenty of times, but I always do it.

(Pause.)

So, if your mother says we ought to talk, then we better do it.

REBECCA: Didn't he have any advice for Mom?

BISHOP: Yeah. “Marcia, everything you ask Ray to do, you ask
sweetly, with a spoonful of sugar, because Ray has an ego the size of Ne-
braska, and it’s very tender. You'll hurt it if you’re not careful.”

REBECCA: Sounds like—

BISHOP: Sounds like I’m hopeless without your mother. Well, it’s
true. Without her I’d be a bigger jerk than I already am. But I keep re-
minding myself that he gave the same advice to everybody. Which means,
as far as he was concerned, in the world of men I’m not unique. We're all
jerks.

(Pause. Even though she says nothing, somehow it’s apparent that she
agrees.) -

So, let’s try again. What do you want to talk about?

(Pause.)

Can I start?

(Pause.)
I'm sorry. I wish this awful thing had never happened to you. I wish my
love for you could cancel it out.
(Pause:)
REBECCA: You know... you're right. 1 mean...
(Pause.)
You're right, we’re a family, and in the past that’s been impor-
tant—don’t— Don’t interrupt me.
(Pause.)

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same

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Boats

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Confessions

What I mean, what I’m saying is. . . like the time I broke my foot. You
took it very seriously, made sure we all did. Even Rex was nice to me. Got
things for me and stuff and he never complained. He tried to get me to
read a science fiction book and, even though I wouldn’t do it, he was still

nice to me. And Kelli, as young as she was, was very helpful. And you did
that. You brought us all together.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: But?

REBECCA: But... that’s not what this situation needs—
BISHOP: How can you say that?

REBECCA: —yet. Not yet.

BISHOP: Why? Can you tell me why?

REBECCA: Because I’m not ready for it.

BISHOP: You don’t want our help?

REBECCA: What kind of help, Dad?

BISHOP: What?
REBECCA: What can you do? Huh? What can you actually do?
(Pause.)
BISHOP: I don’t know, Becky. What can we do?
REBECCA: Right now? Nothing.

BISHOP: There has to be something we can do, some way we can
support you through this.

REBECCA: I’m in a support group—

BISHOP (shakes his head) Strangers.

REBECCA: Not any more.

BISHOP: But they’re just surrogates for us, and we're here. We can
sit with you, we can cry with you—

REBECCA: I’m not crying.

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BISHOP: You’re on the verge. You have been since we started this
thing.

REBECCA: “This thing?” See, Dad, that’s just it. These tears are not
because of Grampa. I stopped crying about that a long time ago. That pain
is buried now. Right now I’m just pissed off.

BISHOP: Why?

REBECCA: Why? “This thing?” “This thing?”

BISHOP: Words, Becky. They’re just words. Maybe they’re the wrong
words. To you. I call it a thing, it’s a thing. What is it? What the hell is it?
You better tell me the right words, Becky, ‘cause, by God, I gotta get the
words right!

(Pause.)

REBECCA (Zero degrees celsius:): Thing. It’s a thing.
BISHOP (As a sigh:) Great.

(Stand off.)

When did you say it happened?

REBECCA: It started when I was eight.

BISHOP: Started?

REBECCA: It wasn’t a one-time thing. It— It was. . . continual. Over
a period of time.

BISHOP: How long?

REBECCA: Four years. Until I was twelve.

BISHOP: Twelve.

REBECCA: Mm-hm

BISHOP: When? I mean, how— how—... did he manage it? Where
was ev— everybody? Where was I during all this?

REBECCA (No build-up. All matter-of-fact:) At home. At work. At

church. In the next room.

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con siia nh uclasSianic Di hkdich atcha Abi hacienda kala Saale aula le ea SR a edn

Confessions

BISHOP: Good Lord.

(Swallow.)

Why did he sto—what made him stop?

REBECCA: J did.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: How?

REBECCA: Mostly by just figuring out how to avoid him. Avoid his

favorite situations. It wasn’t easy. It came down to just saying “no.”
(Pause.)

BISHOP: Why—

REBECCA: Because I didn’t like it!

BISHOP: I meant—... why not... sooner—or later—or . . . why
then?

(Pause.)

REBECCA: I was always trying. It took time. I guess when junior high
was right there in front of me...

(Pause.)
I thought it would be a good time to change, start a new life.

(Pause. This exchange has been even—low key. REBECCA looks away.
Light change. Focus on REBECCA.)

REX (Who may appear or just be a voice:): Hey Sis! How are things?
Things here are pretty good for the most part. Anne auditioned for a
play—a community theatre thing—and I think she’ll get in which means
I'll be home with the kids in the evenings. Good thing I finally finished
school, wouldn't you say? (Not that it’s done me any good.) Listen, I know
this seems strange, getting a letter when I could just as easily call, but I

want you to have a hard copy of this, and besides, getting a letter every
once in.a while is kind of fun, isn’t it?

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J. Scott Bronson

(Pause.)

The deal is this—I’ve been feeling bad about something for a long time
and I want to apologize. I did something to you that I should have been
shot for and I don’t know if you even remember it at all. You’ve never

mentioned it.

(Pause.)

Do you remember the first day of school when I was in the ninth grade
and you were just starting junior high in the seventh grade? I'll bet you
were scared spitless. Hell, when I started junior high I was scared for a
week at least. I would have felt much better if there was a ninth grader,
even just one, that I knew, that I could talk to in the hallways or some-
thing. Some kind of connection with the upper echelons so I wouldn't
have to feel all alone as a lowly peagreen. But there wasn’t anybody like
that. I don’t know if you thought of me that way, maybe I’m giving myself
too much credit here, maybe you didn’t care, or maybe it was something

in between. I don’t know.

(Pause.)

Anyway, that first day, I remember walking down the hall with a bunch
of my buddies between the first and second periods, and just as we were
passing the library I saw you coming the other way carrying a bunch of
books and having a hard time with them I think. You looked up and saw
me and started to smile and were just about to say something, and I gave
you this look. I don’t know how you understood so clearly what I meant,
but I remember very distinctly thinking, “Don’t talk to me, and don’t ever
acknowledge that you know me.” It was a quick look, but before I looked
away I noticed that your face went blank and then somebody knocked the
books out of your hands but I ignored you . . . for the rest of the year.
never saw you again, at least, I don’t remember ever seeing you at school
again after that. Maybe it was you staying out of my way. The thing is, I
had a great year. Ninth grade was something of a triumph for me, but we

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Confessions

won't go into that. And whether it’s true or not, I feel like your first year
in junior high probably sucked because I was such a jerk. But then, that’s
me giving myself too much credit again. I don’t have an older brother, I
don’t know how younger siblings feel about us older brothers. Maybe your
happiness at school didn’t depend on me. I hope not. I did try to make it
up to you three years later when I was a senior and you were just starting
high school. I had figured out by then that I had been pretty cruel to you.
I remember it took me a few minutes to convince you that I really did
want you eat lunch with me and my friends. I’m glad you decided to join
us. My senior year was a good year too, thanks, in part, to you. But I still
feel like crap for the junior high thing, I hope you can forgive me. Even
though you have never said anything about it, I’m pretty sure that J hurt
you that day. I’m so sorry. Very, very sorry. Chalk it up to the fact that I

was fourteen. It just occurs to me that I’m probably the reason you refuse

to teach past the sixth grade. What can I say? You're right, all fourteen-
year-old boys are idiots. I love you. Enlightenedly yours, Rex.

(Light change. Pause.)

BISHOP: I’m sorry, Rebecca. I guess I just don’t know how to respond
to this.

REBECCA: I thought bishops were endowed with special empathy
powers.

BISHOP: We are.

(Pause. Is he kidding? She can’t tell.)

But I’m not your bishop. I’m only your father.
REBECCA: So that let’s you off the hook?
BISHOP: No, of course not, but—.
REBECCA: But what?

BISHOP: I don’t know.

(Pause.)

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J. Scott Bronson

I feel like I’m being crushed between two stones.

REBECCA: Dad, I’m the one who’s the victim here.
BISHOP: I know that. But I’m a victim too, in a way.
REBECCA: How?

BISHOP: Between my daughter and my father?

REBECCA: What’s the problem?

BISHOP: I...1...I can’t believe you can’t see this.
REBECCA: I’m your daughter.

BISHOP: I know that.

REBECCA: Do you love me?

BISHOP: Of course I do. What kind of a question is that?
REBECCA: An honest one.

BISHOP: What are you doing? Wh—wh-what’s going on here?
REBECCA: I need to know where I stand with you.
BISHOP: Are you trying to force me into a choice here?
(Silence.)

I can’t do that!

REBECCA: Why not?

BISHOP: Between the two of you?

REBECCA: Yes.

BISHOP: He was my father!

REBECCA: And I am your daughter! Right here! Right now!
BISHOP: I can’t have you and him?

REBECCA: No.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: Becky, he raised me. He loved me. Despite what he may

have done in later yea—

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Confessions

REBECCA: “May have done?”

BISHOP: Did do. I’m not doubting you. I believe everything you're
telling me. Don’t get the idea that I don’t. I mean, I never could have
imagined him doing anything like this, but now that it’s put before me . .
. it makes sense somehow.

(Pause.)

What I’m saying is, despite his having done this, and despite anything
else he may have done, he was my father and I loved him my whole life.
I did not experience what you experienced. Nothing like it even. Maybe,
after I’ve had some time to. . . think about it, I’ll make some connections.
Pll see some things that he did to me in a different light, and maybe there
won't be so much light there. Maybe I’ll have had a darker childhood than
I thought. But right now, I can’t see-it. Rebecca, my childhood was a
happy one. It was normal. Pretty normal, anyway. My father was not a
demon to me.

(Pause.)

Your grampa made magic out of Christmas. Twinkling lights and music,
and a Santa Claus that I still believe in. He taught me to love trees and
animals and to take time just . . . to go for a walk. I loved going to work
with him and seeing how he supported us. Sometimes I even enjoyed
helping him in the yard. It was all magic.

(Pause.)

I believe you, Rebecca. But my memories of my father are not your
memories. And I can’t just throw them away. I mean— Think about it,
he’s largely responsible for what I am today.

REBECCA: Then you better stay away from Rex’s kids.

BISHOP: What?

REBECCA: So none of them get hurt like this.

BISHOP: It’s a good thing you’re over there and I’m over here.

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REBECCA: Why? You wanna spank me, Daddy? You wanna slap my
face? You wanna kick my ass? Come on! You've been hiding behind that
desk long enough! Come on out here and face me! Or is it too cozy back
there? Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I didn’t see what you did?
Am I that frightening? Am I that repulsive to you that you have to pull
the chair back and run and hide behind this—this—this . . . barricade?
That’s why I came here, Dad. To this office. 1 was hoping maybe I could
get you to treat me like one of your flock, instead of an ugly little girl that
you don’t know how to talk to.

(Pause. It takes a long time but eventually the BISHOP pushes in the comfy
chair and comes out from behind his desk. He rearranges the two wooden chairs
as he did at the beginning, but closer together this time.)

BISHOP: Sit down.

(She sits. He sits.)

You're not ugly.

REBECCA: Yes J am.

BISHOP: No. You're not.

REBECCA: Dad, the only guy I ever dated was Rex. | never went to
a prom, a Sadie Hawkins dance, a ward dance, a stake dance. The only
dance I got at the Gold and Green Ball was with you.

BISHOP: Well, even though I don’t quite know how to deal with this
with you, I have learned a few things about this sort of situation with other
people I’ve talked to. My uneducated guess would be that you may have
something to do with that. You don’t like men very much, do you? And
you don’t go out of your way to hide it either. Am I right?

REBECCA: It’s more complicated than that, but it’s sort of right. The
point is, Dad, nobody even tried.

BISHOP: There was that one guy—

REBECCA: Chris was an idiot.

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Confessions

BISHOP: I know. Your mother and I were glad when you finally told
him to get lost.

(Pause.)

Do you really hate your grampa all that much?

REBECCA: With every fiber of my being.

BISHOP: How can you hate somebody that much?

REBECCA: How could he do what he did?

(Pause.)

Dad, you will not get me to love him. Not anytime soon, anyway.
BISHOP: There’s got to be some way—
REBECCA: Are you kidding? It practically killed me when you

moved him into our house and made me help you take care of him.

BISHOP: You never—

REBECCA: That’s probably the main reason I went on a mission.
(Pause.)

I prayed every night that he would die before I got home.
BISHOP: You prayed for that? How could you do that?

REBECCA: Think about it, Dad. At least he died comfortably. He
didn’t deserve it.

BISHOP: Rebecca—

REBECCA: He died sitting in a Lazy-boy rocker! He should’ve had a
stone tied around his throat and thrown into the ocean!

BISHOP: I don’t think—

REBECCA: Jesus said it, Dad! Jesus, the son of God, himself, said the
very words. Only he called it a millstone.
(Pause.)

It’s exactly what your father deserved.

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(Pause.)

And you don’t agree.

BISHOP (A whisper:) No.

(Light change. Focus on the BISHOP REBECCA remains in the darkness.
The BISHOP picks up the receiver of the phone. Pause.)

Hello. May I speak to Beck—Rebecc— uh . . . Sister Klein, please?
Thank you.

(Pause.)

REBECCA (In darkness:) Hello?

BISHOP: Hi, Beck. How are you?

REBECCA: Dad?

BISHOP: Yeah.

REBECCA: What are you doing?

BISHOP: Well—

REBECCA: I mean, you’re not supposed to call me. I could get in
trouble for this.

BISHOP: You won't get into trouble. I called the Missionary Depart-
ment. They told me to call your mission president. I called him and he
said I could call you. Maybe I’ll get into trouble with your companion,
though. Did I wake her?

REBECCA: No. We've been up for awhile.

BISHOP: Good.

(Pause.)

REBECCA: Dad, this is a trans-atlantic call—what’s going on?

BISHOP: Well...

(Pause.)
Uh, I thought you— I knew you wouldn’t have wanted to wait a week

ot more to find out, so— ] mean, that’s why I called.

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Confessions

(Pause.)

REBECCA: What, Dad?

BISHOP: Your grampa died.

(Pause.)

REBECCA: I’m sorry.

BISHOP: Well, we knew it would happen soon—that it was coming.
REBECCA: When did he die?

BISHOP: This morning. Well, yesterday. Technically it was yesterday.
REBECCA: Mm-hm.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: He, uh... well, he died sitting in his chair, and... and..

. he died comfortably—not in his sleep—but, there was no, uh... uh...
. one minute he was here and the next minute he wasn’t.

(Pause.)

Your mother found him. It was after breakfast. She called me at work,
and— I got the rest of the day off and came home. Uh...

(Pause.)

I, uh... I called Uncle Kent and Uncle Randy and told them. They
both took it pretty well. Uncle Randy was a little more upset because, I
think, because he . . . well, he’s so far away and didn’t get to see Dad very
much these last few years. Kelli knows, of course. She was upset, but she’s
all right now. J called Rex and told him. He took it well, but I told him
not to worry about coming home for the funeral. He— he’d miss too
much school. Besides, he’s never liked funerals. I think he thinks they’re
a waste of time.

(Pause.)

REBECCA: Uh-huh.

BISHOP: And, uh...

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J. Scott Bronson

(Pause.)

REBECCA: Do you want me to come home for the funeral?

BISHOP: No. No, of course not. The missionary committee already
told me that you could come home if you wanted to . . . but that if you
did, you wouldn’t be able to go back into the field.

REBECCA: I’m only— I’ve only got a couple months before I come
home—

BISHOP: I know—

REBECCA: —and I’m right in the middle of some important work.

BISHOP: No—I—I understand. I wasn’t going to ask you to come
home.

(Pause.)

I called because . . . I know how much you love your grampa, how much
he meant to you. I knew you'd want to know right away instead of waiting
for the mail.

(Pause.)

REBECCA: Thanks.

(Pause. Light change. The BISHOP hangs up. Pause.)

I don’t love Grampa, Dad. I haven't loved him for a long time. Not
since I was eight.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: I don’t know what to say.

REBECCA: Figures.

BISHOP: I mean, I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know what
you want to hear, what you want me to say. Wh— uh, wh. . . what's the

proper response here? What do you want me to say?

REBECCA: I don’t want you to say anything.

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Confessions

BISHOP: Bullshit. Why else did you come here? Just to tell me that
it happened? Well, you've told me, thank you very much, and if that’s it,
then... see ya. Good bye. Adios.

(She won't move. Stand off.)
What? What? What do you want?
REBECCA (This is on-the-edge desperate. She is ready either to implode,

or explode. One way or the other doesn’t matter. It’s the actress’s choice.) 1
don’t want anything, Daddy. It’s what I need.

(Pause. The “Daddy” sort of startles him.)

BISHOP: What do you need, then?

(Pause. He wants to ask again, but he waits.)

REBECCA: An apology.

BISHOP: You want me to say I’m sorry? I’m sorry. I’m so very, very
sorry. But Grampa’s the one who owes you the apology. He’s not here.

REBECCA: No. You.

BISHOP: Me what?

(Pause.)

You need an apology from me?

(She nods.)

Why? W— uh, w... what for?

(She appears frightened. This scene mirrors the end of the first flashback.)

Becky, I didn’t do anything. I n—never— I— I never hurt you... like
that. What are you saying? What are you saying?

(Pause.)
Are you accusing me of something?

REBECCA: No.
BISHOP: What then? How did I become the bad guy?

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J. Scott Bronson

(Pause.)

REBECCA: You let it happen.

(Pause.)

BISHOP: I didn’t know. Becky, I didn’t know. How could I have
stopped it?

REBECCA: I don’t know.

BISHOP: You expected me to stop it?

REBECCA: I wanted you to.

BISHOP: But I couldn’t. How can you blame me for this? How can
you hold me responsible? I didn’t do anything wrong.

REBECCA: You said it would be all right! You said everything would
be all right! You promised—

BISHOP: —When? When did I say that?—

REBECCA: —You said it! You said it! You said, “Everything’ll be all
right. I promise. Everything’ll—

BISHOP: —I never said that—

REBECCA: “Daddy and Mommy are going to the temple. We're go-
ing to the temple and you have to go to Grampa’s. You have to go. Please?
For Daddy? Will you go for Daddy?—”

BISHOP: —What—

REBECCA: “You kids’ll have a good time, you'll see, I promise—

BISHOP: —What are you talking about?—

REBECCA: —“We need to go to the temple—it means a lot to your
mother and me—please?—please, for Daddy?—yes, Daddy, I'll go, Pll
go—that’s my girl—you kids’ll have a good time, a good time—every-
thing’ll be all right, I promise, I promise—yes Daddy—.

(Pause.)

You promised.

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Confessions

(Pause.)
BISHOP: Oh my God.
(Pause.)

I'm sorry. Oh, dear God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Please.
Please.

(Pause.)

Please forgive me.

(Pause.)

REBECCA: Doesn't matter.

BISHOP: What? What doesn’t matter?

REBECCA: Doesn't matter. Doesn’t change anything.

BISHOP: Becky, let me do s— let me make it up to you somehow, let
me—

REBECCA: You can’t. You can’t make it up to me. You can’t change
it—you can’t—I thought—I thought you could, but you can't, you can’t.
I thought I could make you see, make you— apologize. And it would—
everything would— But it doesn’t matter— it doesn’t . .. change anyth-
ing. It’s all the same. Everything’s still the same.

BISHOP: What’s the same?

REBECCA: You still love him!

BISHOP: Yes, I do. Jesus loves—

REBECCA: But, I don’t—I can’t—I don’t love—

BISHOP: I love you too—

REBECCA: Well, I don’t! I mean—I mean... you can’t— it, it
doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t help me.

BISHOP: How can it not?

REBECCA: Dad, what happened to me? Do you understand what
happened to me?

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J. Scott Bronson

BISHOP: I think so.

REBECCA: But do you understand what it has done to me? What it
has meant to me?

BISHOP: Not yet—

REBECCA: Never, Dad! You will never know—you will never under-
stand.

BISHOP: How do you know that?

REBECCA: In order for you to understand you'll have to see things
from where I’m at. You'll have to hate your father the way I hate him. How
are you going to manage that? How are you going to develop that kind of
hate?

BISHOP: I don’t—

REBECCA: You'd have to know what he did. You'd have to’ve expe-
rienced it yourself, or you’d have to know what he did to me. You'd have
to let me tell you what he did, let me describe every sickening detail. Do
you want to hear that, Dad? Do you want me to describe for you exactly
what he did to me with his fingers? With his tongue? Do you want me to
describe how he violated me with his penis? How he—

BISHOP: No.

(Pause.)

No. I don’t.

REBECCA: | didn’t think so.

(Pause.)

I wasted your time, Dad. I’m sorry. ’ll see ya.

BISHOP: Becky. Becky, wait a minute. Please wait.

(Pause. She is waiting.) ,
Can we talk again sometime?

REBECCA: Dad—

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Confessions

BISHOP: Please ... Rebecca.
(Pause.)

Maybe not soon, but... . sometime . .. we need to talk about this again.
All right?

REBECCA: I don’t know.
BISHOP: Please.
(Pause.)

REBECCA: All right.

BISHOP: Thank you. And not here. Not in this office. At home. As
your father.

(Pause.)

REBECCA: All right.

BISHOP: Okay.

(Pause.)

Gonna stop by and . . . see your mom for a bit?

REBECCA: No. I think I'll go.right home.

BISHOP: All right. Drive safely.

REBECCA: I will. (Pause. REBECCA moves toward the door. Pause.)

Dad . . . ’'ve— (Long pause. She’s been fighting this truth all evening.) I’ve
never hated Grandpa. That’s what made it so— I’ve never hated him. I’ve
only wished that I could. (Whisperéd:) C'night.

(REBECCA exits. The BISHOP stands in the middle of the room for a
while, unfocused. Suddenly, the part of him that is away, returns, and he whis-
pers:) :

BISHOP: C'’night.

(He sits. He stares. And finally he weeps. Lights out.)

Wasatch Review International / 129

J. Scott Bronson

Confessions was a winner of the first Sunstone Mormon One-act Play
Contest and was first performed as a public reading at the Sunstone Sym-
posium in Salt Lake City, August 20, 1994, with the following cast:

Bishop Ivan Crosland
Rebecca Jennifer Erekson
Rex D. William Shunn
Narrator J. Scott Bronson

Caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that
Confessions is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under all
applicable copyright laws. All rights are strictly reserved. Permis-
sion for performances of any kind, including recitations, lec-
tures, public readings, etc., can be obtained by contacting the
author: 1482 S. 760 E., Orem, UT, 84058. (801) 226-7876.

Scott was raised in San Diego but now lives in Orem, Utah, with one wife, four
children, an apple tree, and a cherry tree. He served a mission to Indonesia and
Georgia (the state). (Don’t ask.) He writes fiction as Scott Everett Bronson—yet
to be published—and has appeared in several television movies. Scott loves to
read science fiction, nature books, mainstream novels, plays, the classics, scrip-
tures and Smithsonian Magazine. He also loves the ocean, egg nog, and rock-n-roll.
And jazz. And classical. Etc.

Wasatch Review International / 130

An Interview with
JOHN BENNION

WR: When did you first see yourself as a writer?

Bennion: Well, it’s funny, I’ve always felt like a writer, but I didn’t al-
ways write. I guess I wrote in school, but I don’t remember much about
that kind of writing. My cousins and I spent a lot of time in the desert west
of Vernon on my father’s and grandfather’s ranches when we were teen-
agers. We wrote doggerel on paper bags or toilet paper, most of them
obscene, about peeing out the cabin door in the sunrise or the Swedish
girls who lived in Vernon or the ballad of the fropes, weird animals that

John, one of the advisors of the Wasatch Review International, is the author of
numerous short stories, one novel, The Burial Pool, which is currently out to pub-
lishers, and a collection of short stories, Breeding Leah. He has published in Dia-
logue, The Best of the West 2, Sunstone, BYU Studies, and Ascent. A teacher at BYU
in the English department, Dr. Bennion obtained his Ph.D in creative writing
from the University of Houston. He and his wife, Karla, and their five children
live in Springville, Utah.

Wasatch Review International / 133

An Interview with

eat skunk manure and generate spontaneously from liver soaked in brine.
Half of them had to do with girls.

Although I thought of myself as a writer of stories, in high school I
planned on becoming a scientist. Then in my senior year I had a wonder-
ful AP English teacher. He changed my direction. As an undergraduate
student at BYU, I took a class from Doug Thayer, Introduction to Litera-
ture. He gave me Ds my first semester—it was my upbringing in rural
Utah afflicting me. I hadn’t really written, except what I had written on
paper bags and toilet paper, and I was a bad writer. Gradually I moved up
to Bs. When I told him I was interested in writing, he recommended the
short stories of Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg
Ohio and I read those two quite a bit. Their language has become a part
of my neurons. In fact, I think Hemingway was too important because
now | have trouble writing in anything but the plain style. So if a narrator
or character wants to speak more eloquently, I have trouble. My writing
has to be flat and dry. And while that can be good—because what I write
about mostly is the desert (shouldn't writing about the desert be flat and
dry?)—it can also be a problem.

WR: Speaking of problems that you encounter in writing, what is the great
challenge that faces you as a writer when you sit down at your computer?

Bennion: The hardest thing is the hardest every time—the job of imag-
ining myself into someone’s else’s head. When I’m writing I feel that I’ve
been spun out of my own head and I’m residing in someone else’s. For me,
it’s an intensely Christian experience, seeing through someone else’s eyes.
One of my first stories, “The Interview,” is about a homosexual man meet-
ing with his stake president for a marriage interview. When I was a fresh-
man at BYU, I met someone who was homosexual. He didn’t tell me so
at the time, I found out later. His therapists tried to convince him that he
wasn’t homosexual, that he was just confused. They sent him through

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some weird activities that ended up in the story. Finally—I was on my
mission at the time—he gave up on it all. It felt false to him and he real-
ized that it wasn’t working. He’s been living with a partner now for 15
years or longer. Anyway, I took his experiences and created a character
and imagined myself into that peculiar character. I could tell rd feapined
well, because when I sent it to Dialogue, one of their readers wrote that if
the story was autobiographical, my effort to make it fiction was clouding
it. I should just tell it in the first person (although anonymously). It was
a compliment because their reaction meant that the core of the story
seemed real to them. But because I was teaching middle school at the
time, I put it in my drawer for several years. Some imaginings are so real
that people judge you for them. But to me it felt like an act of charity, to
imagine every impulse from that person’s viewpoint.

‘To write another story, “Jenny, Captured by the Mormons,” I imagined
myself into the head of a woman whose Mormon husband has abandoned
her—he thinks he’s one of the prophets spoken of in the Book of Reve-
lation. To provide for herself and her children, she’s become a con-artist.
Some days she panhandles on Temple Square, others she works Chick
and governmental welfare. She once sold the members of her ward white
corn flour, telling them that it was discovered in a Jaredite cave in Mex-
ico, and that it would help them live longer than a hundred years. After
I finished the story, a woman who had lived on the street asked me where
I got all my ideas, meaning my tactics for “working” people for money. I

was highly complimented because I’d cooked them all up in my fevered
brain.

WR: A lot of your writing deals with sexual tension between a man and
woman. Why is that?

Bennion: It’s of universal concern to people. I’ve always been fasci-
nated by sexuality. As a teenager, I was (and still am) tremendously shy.

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An Interview with

As a consequence, my friendships with young women were rocky or imag-
ined. Relationships never became as romantic as I thought they should.
Maybe that’s why I’m interested in this sexual tension—for the kind of
reason that some people become psychologists, they want to work out
some personal problem.

In this I’m like Thomas Hardy. Only in my dreams could I be as good
a writer as he is, but like me, he writes about human sexuality. He works
that subject in every novel. For example, Tess is destroyed by her and her
culture’s tangled ideas of sexuality. She’s had sex with a man before, so
her new lover won't have her because she’s spoiled.

Fiction needs to be written about human sexuality. In Winesberg Ohio,
Sherwood Anderson describes a woman who has some deep troubles, and
he says there will have to be a lot of careful books written about women
like her. Sexuality is so complex and has so much natural tension in it,
there’s a good opportunity in it for fiction. Careful books need to be writ-
ten.

Despite my main interest, all troublesome relations are fodder for writ-
ing, not just male-female relations. My father was an alcoholic and it
drove me crazy when I was a teenager. Several times I tried to approach
him but he wouldn't let me. (How would it be for a self-righteous child to
discover your secrets, tell you how to act?) Before my mission, he said he’d
stop, but it wasn’t something he could do. I didn’t understand that at all
at the time, I thought he was a sinner. Because I was ashamed of him, |
worked on father/son relations in my fiction. All of the stories in my mas-
ter’s thesis are father/son stories where I try to come to terms with my own
father. One is about the son of an overbearing father who is left in the
desert to take care of a pump engine. The engine overheats. The boy
should have heard the change in the sound of the engine when it over-
heated or he should have kept the leaky radiator filled with water, but he
didn’t. He ruins the engine. In the story he’s waiting in the desert for his

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John Bennion

father to come back, and he knows it’s going to be like God coming down
on him. I wrote about Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain, about a
father and a son trapped in a snow storm, and about a son lying to his
father about the son’s dog, which has been killing sheep.

. WR: You said that getting out of Utah, getting some distance on your mate-
rial, was one of the best things that happened to you as a writer.

Bennion: Just getting away from Utah helped me to see my material,
my growing up as a Mormon in a desert town, as something unique.
When something is too close to you, it isn’t interesting and you can’t see
it. I love living in Utah now, but I had to get away to discover myself
through the eyes of my friends and teachers at the University of Houston.

WR: What do you try to do for your students? You can’t get them out of
Utah.

Bennion: Many of them don’t come from Utah. A student from Mary-
land can teach a student from Utah something about her culture. The
same is true in reverse; the student from Maryland can learn something
here. In terms of the environment in Utah, the mountains and the desert,
I try to get students to look at it longer. I teach a wilderness writing class
and one activity is for the students to sit and observe. If they look at some
natural scene long enough, it’s transformed. The same is true of objects
or people—watched they become unfamiliar. My fiction is based on some-
thing bizarre, unhappy, or evil working under the surface. If you look at
your own life long enough, something foreign and frightening comes up.
The metaphor of the desert fits. The desert gives the illusion of being

quiet, no movement, but if you watch long enough you'll see a rattlesnake
or scorpion you could have stepped on.

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An Interview with

To explore their own lives, at the beginning of each class I have stu-
dents write a 3,000 word personal narrative. Carol Bly, author of The
Passionate Accurate Story says that this activity flushes the personal ma-
terial out. Students get rid of it so they don’t write egotistically anymore,
but I also find that these narratives often have cracks and gaps in them,
contradictions and omissions that make material for essays and fiction.

I also have students play “What if??—that game central to writers.
You've got a young man talking to his stake president? What if he’s gay?
What if he’s thinking about getting married to a good woman he’s met?
To me the game of “What if?” is the whole pleasure of writing fiction.
What if there’s a missionary who falls in love with one of his contacts?
What does that make him think about God? Does he think God’s playing
tricks on him? What if he starts feeling that God has singled out this
woman for him—like in Saturday’s Warrior-—that this has been arranged
for him by God? The result is that the act of falling in love starts him
wondering, and the character himself starts playing “What if?” Then what
if he has sex with her? In the first drafts of my novel, The Burial Pool, I
didn’t let this missionary play with that possibility. But for me there was

no story.

WR: Let’s take for example someone who has something valid to say about
his experience in the LDS church. He joined the Church as a young man, had
some negative experiences, then left. He wants to write, but can’t play the “what
if’ game. He can’t say, “What if the bishop who did such-and-such was really
doing the right thing?” Or “What if I’m wrong?” How can this writer get around
this inability to do the “what if”?

Bennion: First off, the “what if’s” are severely limited if you don’t love
people and if your love for people isn’t growing. Your preconceptions re-
strict the free play of characters in action. One of the changes from
Thomas Hardy’s early novels to his later work is that his comprehension

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John Bennion

of his characters changed. His early depictions of women and men are
shallow and stereotypical. Then he experienced pain in his life, and his
comprehension of his characters, his love for them, grew. The mayor of
Castorbridge is not very likable, but the reader likes him because Hardy
does. In his real life Hardy and his wife were very cruel to each other, but
in his fiction his “what if’s” grew wider and wider. That’s an odd irony. He
may have been more in love with his fictional characters, like Tess or
Eustacia Vye, than with his wife. His great power was to feel something
for a character and then release that feeling, enabling his narrative imagi-
nation to take over. That’s the act of fiction—to imagine yourself into a
character’s head, but then to release her to be what she is. You love her
life, even if her life is evil; you see her reasons for being that way and you
love her. A Mormon writer who is angry all the time, either at outsider
characters or insiders, can’t achieve the kind of balance Hardy did. Anger
is a good emotion to begin with but the act of writing has to bring it back
into control.

Don D. Walker said there are two problems with Mormon writers:
some people are so fully in the Church they can’t see what they are writing
about—everything’s all sweetness and light—while others are so far out
that they can’t see the structure of the Church and the tradition of the
Church as a valid ground for tension. William Mulder suggested that a
writer has to be both inside and outside. But how can someone be outside
and inside at the same time? If you're outside enough to offer social satire
Or criticism, it’s often seen as an attack on the church. One of the things
Shakespeare did in his plays was to offer gentle criticism toward the mon-
archy, but his instruction was buried in his pleasurable triple-level stories.
I can imagine the Queen watching those plays and being happy even as
she was criticized. We need more Shakespeares. I think there’s a lot of
room for humor in Mormon writing, ways of poking fun at ourselves, at

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An Interview with

our serious ways. We need to laugh at things. As Chieko Okazaki says, we
need to lighten up.

WR: Are there ways that good Mormon fiction should be different from

literature in general?

Bennion: I think it would have its unique stamp. Our uniqueness lies
in the tension between obedience and free agency. Our stories can be
quite spiritual, but spirituality is not avoiding conflict. Many of out aa
have the fear and true opposition taken out of them. Such stories don’t
teach us how to become stronger spiritually. They have all the beautiful
ambiguity taken out of them. They might as well be preachments because
they only teach precepts. We need more stories that teach us how to
wrestle with spiritual ambiguity.

Mormon writers have looked to the stories of Flannery O’Connor for
a model, but we can look other places for ideas of how to create spiritual
tension. In his Sickness unto Death, Soren Kirkegaard says that true Chris-
tians should be frightened not of physical pain or death, but of spiritual
pain or death—the second death, he calls it. In order for a Mormon cee
acter to be challenged, really to go through anguish, a writer can’t avoid
sin. You have to have a boy struggling with hatred, real murderous anger,
as the character does in Doug Thayer’s Summer Fire. Or you have a girl
struggling with her own sexuality and with her father’s faithful bigotry, as
in Margaret Young’s “Outsiders.” You have to have good people falling
into sin.

In order to write this kind of fiction the author has to know both insider
and outsider perspectives, be able to describe both faithful people and
rebels with equal sympathy. I think that’s why ’'m interested in what ais
garet Young’s doing. She’s writing this kind of double perspective litera-
ture. In Salvador you find serious criticism of the excesses of western and

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John Bennion

Mormon culture. At the same time you have a story about spiritual dis-
cernment, not seeing with the eye of the flesh.

Isaac Bashevis Singer had the same problem as Mormon writers
do—trying to write a complex spiritual angle. His characters seem
weird—superstitious clowns—but he doesn’t think of them that way. He
uses the oddness of his culture—goblins, demons, and angels. When we
talk to non-Mormons we try to push our oddness under the rug: polyg-
amy, the three Nephites, the fact that we know the location of heaven, or
the feeling that you can make the decisions based on a gift that comes and
leaves and is not rational and has nothing to do with rationality. None of
these things are weird for us, but if you imagine an outsider perspective,
you realize we are really quite peculiar. Levi Peterson is one writer who
does for Mormon literature what Singer does for Yiddish.

I believe that we can write nationally recognized fiction that has the
stamp of Mormon spirituality. An institute teacher once told me that it’s
impossible to effectively record spiritual experiences. The act of writing
always changes them. You try to write them and they come out funny,
weird. In a rational medium, they become comic. But we need to try.

WR: In addition to writing about spiritual matters in a “rational medium,”
are there other problems Mormons face in writing?

Bennion: People talk about the glass ceiling with women. Well, we
have a glass ceiling against dealing with serious theological questions and
sexuality. We’re not supposed to even talk about these things. My own
weak spot is that I get angry at that ceiling, so I think, I’m going to violate
that ceiling every chance I get. I put all kinds of artificial, subversive, or
angry or radical things in there that don’t naturally belong in the
story—direct sexual description, abuse, women wanting the priesthood.
Then I have trouble making the story balanced. Right now I’m writing
about a woman who has a deep natural feeling which prompts her to give

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An Interview with

blessings in her ward, priesthood blessings. I find myself putting in every
current subject about women’s liberation and it really doesn’t fit, and it

makes the material I’m working trendy.
WR: So you're not writing to make a political statement?

Bennion: I don’t mind making a political statement, but if I go over-
board, my material doesn’t quite fit the story, which is the bottom line.
It’s hard to find a balance when you feel like you are repressed. Maybe I’m
not repressed. But there’s that feeling and I go overboard to try to exceed

some imaginary watchdog’s expectation.
WR: So what else would you like to see happen in Mormon literature?

Bennion: We talked about the two camps—serious, academic, philo-
sophical outsider fiction and popular fiction. It would be interesting if
there were more in the middle.

I recently gave a paper about the separate roles of rationalist and faith-
ful fiction for an Association for Mormon Letters meeting. Can those two
exist side-by-side in the same culture? I hope so because I believe that
there’s a purpose for each one.

I think faithful fiction strengthens our identity as a people. Through
portraying characters who are heroic, not doubtful and divided, it helps
us hear the voice of the tribe. Jack Weyland writes this kind of fiction. His
fiction is designed to teach young people how to chart their way past
serious challenges: death of loved ones, drug addiction, sexual abuse. His
map is always sure, but his characters aren’t allowed to really wrestle. No
main character or reader can be exposed to real despair. His characters
always make it back home. The girl in Stephanie is a drug addict, a serious
problem, but he doesn’t just take her from drug addiction to beginning
recovery. By the end of the book she’s getting married in the temple after

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John Bennion

. ,
everything she’s gone through. That kind of progress in such a short time
is unrealistic, but it still serves an important purpose. If Stephanie can
become perfect inside one book, a reader can have hope. Maybe it’s not

a realistic hope, but if you are completely rational and realistic, it’s hard
to have hope.

I want to save a place in my life and my children’s life for this kind of
story and also, the faith-promoting stories that our culture treasures—for
example the story about the young men who sacrificed their lives to help
the members of a pioneer company cross a frozen river. But in addition to
faithful stories we need others, like Abraham taking Isaac up the moun-
tain—tough, paradoxical, ambiguous stories. This kind of story stretches
our limits, makes us welcome the stranger and his strange stories, as Bruce
Jorgensen puts it. We need both faithful fiction and humanistic, rational-
istic, and testimony stretching forms of fiction.

WR: Do you think we are achieving some success in Mormon literature, and
who do you see as writers having done this? You mentioned Chieko Okazaki. I
read her books as personal narrative and they were beautifully done. If she had
the time, I think she could write and contribute a lot to Mormon literature.

Bennion: She’s wonderful. She’s revitalized my own religion for me
made me alive again. She’s astonishing. She had hard times and aca:
try to hide it. She overcame the hard times and talks about them. She
doesn’t speak tespectfully of someone who uses power incorrectly, even if
it’s social power, not some kind of religious or political power. To answer
your first question, many writers are using Mormon material and publish-
ing in the national market. Walter Kirn, Darrell Spencer, Brian Evanson.
and Phillis Barber are just four. :

WR: Any last words?

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An Interview with

Bennion: Writing has been like a university in Christian humanism to
me. What’s happened to me, as I’ve been writing this last novel for about
ten years, is not the discovery of abstractions or principles but of the treas-
ure of minute details and individual perspectives. I’ve banged heads with
my characters, over and over and over again, until my real head and their
imaginary one are both broken, rehealed, transformed. In my novel, I ask
myself, Why would a missionary jump off a plane and run back and have
sex with his contact? Why would he throw his life away? It’s been fasci-
nating research.

Through all this process, my wife, Karla, who is the most sensible, sta-
ble, wise person I know, reads my novel and says, “What is this, a male
fantasy?” so I go back to it and try to get more fully into the characters’
mind. I find out how their eyes see and their body moves. I focus on how

a singular man relates to a particular woman. I’ve learned sentence by
sentence how to give up my vested interest enough to see the universe

from someone else’s perspective.

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Book Review

“The Paradox of Salvation.” A review of She Needed Me, by Walter Kirn
(New York: Pocket Books, 1992, Hard cover $20 U.S.) Reviewed by Valerie
Holladay, associate editor of the Wasatch Review International.

Unlike My Hard Bargain, Kirn’s collection of short stories, his novel
does not deal with Mormonism, nor with the Mormon culture. Then why
this review in a Mormon literary journal? She Needed Me is about playing
God—sincerely, wholeheartedly, vainly—and learning how far short we
fall when we try. It is about the temptation we may have to save people,
rather than to love them. And yet, paradoxically, it is through Weaver’s
attempt to save Kim that he understands how human and imperfect he
is, and, in turn, the more human he becomes. A process similar to that
taught by Jesus: that by losing ourselves in service, the more there is of us
to find.

Kirn takes on a complex moral, political, and religious dilemma in a
deceptively simple beginning:

We met outside an abortion clinic.

The girl was standing up, about to walk inside.

I was in front of her, lying down. (p. 1)

Weaver Walquiest, a born-again Christian and a member of the “Con-
science Squad,” is the central figure of Walter Kirn’s first novel, She
Needed Me. Pam Houston describes Weaver as “gentle, misguided and
convincingly paralyzed by the fear of letting anyone into his life.” Weaver

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Valerie Holladay

is a masterful creation, a character who is rigid, intolerant, even fanati-
cally blind, who nevertheless invites our sympathy. Says Weaver of his
childhood: “Maybe all children feel as small as I did, as if they might just
fall in and disappear while sitting on a parent’s lap.” He finds that stolen
bottles of vodka from his mother’s liquor store help combat the feelings
of being small. Drugs helped, too. “Having feelings you can’t describe and
having them often, makes you lonely. Getting stoned made me lonely, but
getting more stoned made it seem all right.”

As Weaver grows older, his mother encourages him to “broaden his
horizons,” but Weaver resists the woman he calls “my mother the busi-
nesswoman.” “I did not want my horizons broadened,” he says. “I knew
that the broader they got, the smaller I would feel, and I felt small enough
already.”

Through religion, Weaver finds security. “I was not raised religious,” he
says. He is introduced to the power of religion when he is saved by Lucas
Boone when Lucas finds Weaver lying on the floor of a Greyhound stra-
tion choking on his vomit and pain pills. When Weaver is baptized, he is
amazed and grateful to be “a whole new human.” By the time Weaver
meets Kim, he is a salesman for Sanipure, a Christian corporation based
in Ohio that purchases soaps and beauty products from leading manufac-
turers and distributes the product after placing a cross-shaped label on
them.

Weaver, a vigilant Christian, is supremely conscious of his duty to save
the unborn children who are threatened by abortion-seeking mothers. He
is devoted to the “Conscience Squad” leader, Lukas Boone, “a veteran of
the Navy Seals who had given his soul to the Lord of Hosts during an
arctic training exercise.”

It is outside of an abortion clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota that Weaver
meets Kim Lindgren. Kim is 23 and pregnant and friendless.

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Paradox of Salvation

“Pll help you,” I said. “There are counselors here. They'll let you know
your options.”

“You said you'd help me.”
“Our counselors——” I raised my hand, a shield.
“You,” the girl said. “You said you would.”

When the demonstration outside the abortion clinic turns into a brawl,
Kim disappears. She calls a few days later, and Weaver's offer to help is
again cloaked within the safety of the organization. Kim hangs up on him.

Desperate and determined to help, Weaver tracks down Kim, knowing
that “sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating
inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heart-
beat, a touch can be enough.”

When Kim’s former boyfriend destroys her apartment, Weaver finds he
has “no choice” but to invite her to stay at his apartment. Then, when
Lucas Boone is accused of rape, the “Conscience Squad” is disbanded.
Weaver is glad for an excuse to take Kim home to her family, as he is
disturbed to find himself attracted to her. They travel first to her home,
and then to Weaver’s home as Weaver strives to “save” both Kim and her
unborn child. To save, because he finds it safer to save Kim than to fall in
love with her.

“I really wish you'd read that book I gave you . . .,” I said.

“Hold me,” said Kim. “I’m scared.”

I stepped back. “You're fine. Let's get you packed.”

Kim’s child, however, was still alive, still growing, and that was
something I could be proud of. I thought of the cluster of cells inside
her womb curled up in fluid, tiny fingers. I dreamed about it almost
every night. I imagined the child was a boy and that he would grow
up strong and healthy, surrounded by a loving circle of relatives and
friends. Of course, he would never know what I had done for him,
but I would know, and that would be enough.

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Valerie Holladay

Kirn’s book is both a love story and an exploration of the paradoxes of
moral guardianship. Fans of Walter Kirn’s My Hard Bargain will enjoy his
first novel as well. And for those who were dissatisfied with his stories for
one reason or another, read She Needed Me. It’s for any human being who
has any desire at all to become more human, and in doing so, to become

more like God.

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